Dell SC Series Reviews

Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode), Fast Track.

Additional features like Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode) and Fast Track makes this storage unique. Moreover, you can integrate your existing infrastructure--no matter whether it's FC or FCoE or iSCSI--with this unified storage solution. This means you don't need to buy a new storage solution for future escalation.

Improvement is a continuous process for every technology. Similarly, Compellent is improving its software (Storage Center) and releases updated version often.

One and a half years.

Not yet. But matching color coding during zoning is sometimes a little bit annoying.

No.

Not yet.

I don't have any complaints.

Excellent. I think EMC support service is equivalent of Copilot service of Compellent. And their response time is really good.

Switched from EqualLogic because of Unified scale out architecture. You can use this storage file and block level both. Further, if you consider with others OEM like EMC for unified solution you have to consider VNX 5200/5300 above. Whereas there is no model dependency on Compllent.

No issues. The installation and configuration is very simple.

Yes. I did the implementation. There is no doubt about Dell's expertise level. They have really an efficient and expert group of people.

Technically I can say that day to day cost is at a considerable level. Previously I told you if you consider 5-8 years solution then it'll minimize your day to day cost. Because, later to scale up your capacity you just need to add DAE (Disk Array Enclosure). That's all. And DAE is cheaper than buying a new storage for scale up capacity.

None.

Definitely I would like to say to all others, if you want good unified storage solution with satisfactory level ROI just go with Compellent. It'll give you flexibility, good ROI and you can integrate your existing infrastructure without facing complexity, no matter what kind of infrastructure you have (FC, iSCSI or FCoE).

This is our SAN product for use with a traditional VMware setup, using VMware clusters. We have the 150 terabyte enclosure.

This product should be a lot more user-friendly.

A central management system should be put in place to make it easier to configure.

I have been using this solution for two years.

The technical support is great. We have 24/7 support with a four-hour response. They are responsive and they stay to help until the problem is resolved.

One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device. Then, the new hardware was shipped to us the next day.

I also use HPE Nimble and I find that it is a lot easier to use and offers us more features.

I inherited this solution when I joined the company. In terms of setting it up, we add this SAN into a VMware cluster. The initial setup is unnecessarily complex, and much more so than a solution like HPE Nimble.

This product is too expensive compared to others, and I don't see any value in using it.

In summary, it's a nice product but it's too expensive and too complicated to set up.

If I were rating this product solely on the management or administrative side, I would rate it a one out of ten because it's just ridiculous. Performance-wise, I can rate it a four or five out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

We primarily use it to support our customers. We are a managed service provider.

We have private and public clouds that we use it for. 

The performance over the years has been great. We like the platform and the upgrade features that it has. The biggest thing which we like is the support that we receive.

We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads. Therefore, we are getting great performance. Our customers have been very satisfied because they use a wide range of applications.

We use the data migration utilities a lot. 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. 

It allows us to focus on what we want to do. We want to work with our customers, helping them with their applications. We've had only a few times that we have to call into support for additional performance to make sure everything is working well. Each time, the support teams come back and show us areas that we need to strengthen on, and our customers have been very happy.

Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support).

The auto-tiering feature is one of the key reasons that we do use the SC Series platform. It was cost effective and allowed us to have high-end 15K discs, then auto-tier those down to 7K discs, which gave us the best value for our money.

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

It is very stable. Upgrades have been pretty much flawless. Being able to swap out components and upgrade them later on has also been a huge benefit in keeping the platform cost effective.

It is very scalable. It's been able to function for all its assigned workloads.

Their support is probably the best I have ever worked with.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

I was able to utilize the Dell EMC support team and have everything installed and upgraded.

It is one of the most cost effective systems for us. We have been able to run it longer than most, getting the most benefit and money out of it.

We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value.

Look at the Compellent solution. It probably offers the most features: 

• Ease of use with their system.
• Being able to configure it.
• Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours. 
  

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The support team behind it.
• The stability of the system. 

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.

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 it for VDI, mainly. In terms of performance, there were some difficulties to begin with, with a lot of different upgrades. It took a lot of time because we've got several of them. With all the upgrades done, it has run pretty smoothly.

Right now, we've just got one particular system on it, where we're just trying to test the waters to figure out if it's good because we use a combination of Dell EMC and Cisco equipment. So far, the Dell EMC seems to be doing pretty well. There are some applications that we've run where it appears that the Dell EMC would be a better solution.

We like the integration, the nodes themselves, the way that everything is integrated together. It seems like it's less hardware to keep up with.

Speed and performance seem to be good on the hardware side.

One option I would like to see is, when you're up on the view-screen, to be able to incorporate getting to what HPE calls the iLO, the Integrated Lights-Out. To be able to get that instead of having to go back and trying to find IP addresses and re-institute those would be good. It would be good to be able to that put on the initial splash screen.

As I said, when we first deployed it, there were a lot of upgrades that had to be done. We would have trouble with this or that, networking would fall, stalls, delays. We would have to run through another upgrade. We've got about 50 or 60 of these pieces of equipment, and to do an upgrade would take 30 to 40 hours.

We've had to coordinate that back and forth, as this is a live system. Since we got through that process - and it took weeks - it seems to have been a lot more stable. It's almost to the point now that we can say that we're pleased with it. To begin with, we were ready to throw it out the window.

We like the scalability. It seems like we can increase it and add to it when the need comes, to meet our growth.

In my position, I don't use the technical support. We do have other employees who, I'm sure, have used it. There are several times that we've called them. So far, we have not had complaints about the tech support. They've been able to resolve the issues that we've had.

We have found it to be affordable. Comparing the cost with other hardware, it seems to be right in line with the compute and the storage that we get with it. The cost is a saw-off compared to other options because there's not a lot of difference between them. You just have to figure out what would be the best.

I would consider Dell EMC to be one of the top options, by all means. I've liked HPE, but it seems that they are integrating with that, as far as VMware is concerned. The two that we're currently using are Cisco and Dell. They're the main two that we're bouncing back and forth with.

At times the SC Series has been slow. Most of the time, we have found the problem is on the appliance side, not the hardware side.

I rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get it to a ten it would need fewer upgrades and getting things right to begin with. That's really one of the core issues that we've had with it: so many upgrades. Once every two to three weeks we've had to upgrade firmware or something else. Although now, that has slowed down.

We are heavily virtualized and it is used for the storage. It's performing well, we have had no issues to date.

It has improved our organization because before, we had the storage in silos. This solution allowed us to consolidate into a single Compellent system. That helped us to maximize our management greatly. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to replicate. We are running a financial company and it needs to be available 24/7. We can't afford any downtime.

The response time is also great.

We've had failures with disks, but no downtime. We were able to change them before they caused a problem.

It is a stable solution. We haven't had any downtime.

It can scale. We actually added a different chassis to it during the time we were using it.

Technical support was responsive, we got to the right person. We have never had a problem with them.

We were using EqualLogic before we went to the SC Series. We switched because we had them in silos so we needed to consolidate.

When we select a vendor, our most important criteria is that we should be able to depend on their product. Absolutely no failures. Uptime is most important.

I wouldn't say the setup was straightforward. It was complex, but it was manageable at the same time.

The solution is affordable. We bought an entry-level solution and, for the price and the amount of storage that we got, we consider it a deal.

We are a Dell EMC shop, so we always go with Dell EMC and Vmware as we have never been in a situation where we were unable to find a Dell product that suited our requirements perfectly. 

If you don't have a SAN infrastructure, this is a great one, a great entry-level SAN to start with.

We are actually moving on to a vSAN. Within the next two months, we won't be using the SC Series anymore and will be migrating away from it to a vSAN. There were no problems with the SC Series, we just wanted to implement a hyperconverged system.

The SC Series performed the functions we needed it to perform.

It back-ends our vSphere virtualization farms.

Overall, it has really helped us to virtualize a lot of workloads where server or application owners were very hesitant to move away from their physical boxes because they were used to having local disks and the performance that came with that. With the SC Series SAN, the performance that we've gotten out of the boxes alleviated anyone's concerns. We do not get complaints about the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

Also, 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.

• Reliable
• Good performance
• Economical
  

We also utilize replication. And the data progression feature gives us the ability to economically utilize those solid state discs by having a three-tier solution. That was key for the product.

We make use of VMware's VMotion features quite a bit. You don't even know that the SAN is there. It just moves the workload. It does it quickly. We've been happy.

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.

We haven't had any issues affecting the stability.

It was easy to expand. In year two of our owning the SC8000 SANs, we expanded the flash tiers and it was a piece of cake. Very easy.

I have called the SC Series support and they've been great.

I worked with a VAR on the initial setup of the product. It was very straightforward, very easy to bring it online.

We were able to afford two tiers of flash storage at a price where the competition was giving us one tier or just a handful of discs.

We looked at several vendors. I work in public education so we have to consider alternate sources for every major purchase. Dell EMC gave us the most bang for the buck and we are comfortable working with them as a company.

When we look to work with a vendor, the important criteria are follow-through, ease of communicating with the vendor, and the quality of technical support.

You have to do your preparation and research but that's no different than buying any SAN. Get to know your local Dell EMC pre-sales engineer quite a bit because they'll be able to help you properly size the unit.

In our mixed workloads, we generally see sub-10ms latency on the product. I don't really have any stats for high-end IOPS because we are not really doing high-performance computing. We have mixed workloads and I'm more concerned with latency than IOPS. But the performance has been great. We have been very happy with it.