Dell SC Series Reviews

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 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.

Our primary use case is for the traditional environment like virtualization and the database exchange.

Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable. 

The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view. 

In the next release, I would for them to improve their application feature. 

I would also like to see some cloud integration.

I have been using Compellent for around two years. 

We have zero downtime. There is no disruption at all. It's highly stable with all the types of abundant solutions. All the hardware parts are in abundance.

It's easy to expand without affecting the current production but there definitely is a limit with each model but that's to be expected.

Support wise, it's very stable. The support is 100% good. Support is the key for Dell EMC.

The setup was straightforward. I implement it for my customers. It can be deployed within an hour. 

You only need one person for the deployment. One person is more than enough. There's no dedicated team required.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

It's better to have it certified first then hand in the petition. 

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.

Dell Compellent storage just provides for our storage needs.

It has given us a reliable and dynamic storage system that we did not match before with our previous solution.

The feature I have found the most valuable is that the interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly.

I think it would be nice if the connection were better integrated with the network so I could get a broader view of both the network and the system. This would be good in order for us to be able to troubleshoot anything that is going wrong.

The product has improved so much over the years that it is hard to think of something else that it really needs to be improved now in comparison to where it was. It is actually kind of good the way it is. Nothing is really annoying me right now. It is really just working and you hardly have to know it is there.

The product is both stable and scalable.

It is a scalable product. We don't have any problem with that. Right now we have about 600 end-users on the system.

I'm very satisfied with the company's technical support. It's very nice. We were using Dell's Copilot Support and it was really very good.

Five years ago we used to have some off-brand thing. It was not a very good solution. It was just a collection of hard drives. When we got to a point we realized it wasn't able to do the job we had to choose another solution. That was when we did a little research and switched to a virtual environment and went with Compellent.

I think that overall the setup was pretty complex. It is not something you just set up in a heartbeat. You need to do some configuration so it takes a little bit longer than just push a button to install.

I think that overall that the product is very good for us and what we need it to do. 

The advice I would give to other people considering Compellent depends on what they want to do and what they want to use it for. I'm going with a hybrid converged infrastructure now. If you looking for traditional storage then I would definitely recommend it.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best. I would rate Compellent overall as a seven.

Our primary use case of this solution is for deduplication software but that is just one of the features we use it for. We also use it for infrastructure protection or other objectives.

The most valuable features would be the ease of use and the cost effectiveness. Compared to other mid-range constrict technologies from Dell, this is a much cheaper solution.

Compared to other solutions, Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform, for instance, to block a level of support can only be done through two different platforms.

The solution is very stable.

It is easy to scale - you can either add additional hard drives, or use expansion closures. That makes it easier to scale. We have a broad spectrum of small, medium and large-scale clients, and we are able to cover all sizes of organizations.

The technical support is quite good, especially coming from the speed of the technology and support that we received in the past. So yes, it's quite recommendable.

The setup and installation are much simpler now because Dell has standardized the configure process. 

I would definitely recommended this solution to others. However, if they are looking at the unifier, there are other alternatives. I would like to see it becoming more unified in the next release. I will give it an eight out of ten, because I think there is room for improvement. Nothing's perfect.

We are a solution provider and this we resell this solution to our clients.

The most valuable features are the Compression and Deduplication.

It is difficult to say where this solution needs improvement because it is very good.

While the price is competitive, in the next release it would be better if they could reduce the fees.

I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine.

I am satisfied with the technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward, it took one day to deploy it.

The deployment model is for all cloud types.

We deployed this solution ourselves.

The pricing of this solution is competitive.

We are partners with Dell EMC.

I would recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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. 

The compression capability is the solution's most valuable feature.

The interface could be simplified.

The cost of the solution could be better.

The solution is stable.

I'm unsure about how truly scalable the solution is. It might be scalable. I don't know for sure. We have about 100 people using it right now.

Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent.

We did previously use a different solution. We switched because there's big portfolio in our environment. Sometimes it's Compellent, sometimes it's IBM.

The initial setup is okay.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend it to others. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution's most valuable features are its storage capabilities and its duplication.

The solution could use more integration with popular backup systems. Dell storage solutions are not very integrated. There are no dedicated models for, for example, Veeam backup or Redhouse backup, etc.

The lower model, the 3000, should have duplication. It doesn't right now. It's only from 5000 that this is offered, but it depends on the performance. It could be they don't offer it on lower models because the duplication is too much of a burden to the performance.

The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all.

Scalability is okay, but the pricing of additional discs is pretty high. It's more optimized for the whole model of discs, not for single disc upgrades. We have about 500 users on the solution currently.

Technical support is good. They have good information and good remote monitoring of the systems. There are good accessibility and knowledgable engineers, so overall, we have a very good impression of the support of this solution. The take a reasonable amount of time to answer our queries.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We added this to replace some older methods because it's flexible and the visual storage was generally a very good idea.

The initial setup was rather straightforward. Deployment took about a month for the  5000, and the SC 3000 took about a week.

In terms of assistance with implementation, for the 5000 we used the Dell pilot program and for the SC 3000 we used a reseller.

We purchased the whole package at once. We don't pay any additional fees annually.

We are using the private cloud deployment model and utilize both the 3000 and 5000 models of the solution.

My advice to others considering using the solution would be, first of all, to buy the full disc on the shelf, not part of the shelf. Buy all the discs, and then buy another shelf because it's most effective financially. Buying a single disc is extremely ineffective and extremely expensive.

I would also advise others to look for backup software that is compatible. If you use something and it's not supported, you may be disappointed. We don't use it and don't plan to use it, so this is not a problem for us. There are probably others, however, that may look for an optimization method for their backups.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten; it would be higher if the solution had better integration capabilities.