Dell SC Series Reviews

We use it for our production loads and for whatever is running on all the production VMs, including our database and regular applications. In terms of performance, we have had issues once or twice, but apart from that, it has been amazing.

With mixed workloads, we are seeing at least a 15 to 20 percent improvement. The protocols also make it easier than in days past. We just follow the process. Finally, instead of buying new storage, with the thin nodes in this solution we are leveraging almost a one-to-two ratio.

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

The 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.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see some kind of I/O meter, to indicate what we are using in terms of performance. I would like to see automation with that, where it would give me the trends. I want to know these things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur. We want to see the trends, performance-wise.

The stability is perfect. That's why we keep on using Dell EMC products in particular.

The scalability is okay. We buy a new product so that we do not reach the limit. For example, if we are anticipating storage needs of 60 or 80TB, we buy a 100TB. We plan at least 25 percent more, in advance, so we haven't had the chance to scale them up.

Our experience with technical support has been absolutely wonderful. They have a pretty good team.

The solution is affordable, but we are a large customer with Dell EMC and we have corporate level discounts. Having said that, everybody definitely, obviously, wants the cost to be lower. And now there is All-Flash and its price is going down day by day.

We don't want Dell EMC to be a monopoly, as our only product. So we do have a competition, which helps with price negotiation. We have NetApp products as well, that's the main competitor. Technology-wise, we compare a few workloads there, a few workloads here. Doing so also helps us avoid any major downtime, any major outages.

We'll attend trade shows, and Dell EMC will also call us to give us a technical briefing. At that time they explain the differences between the old and new products. Then, we'll look at the budget we have and the anticipated production with that solution, and go from there.

We have an internal process. We have to go through all the vendors and weigh metrics we have defined. From there, we have to explain to our internal architecture team what the differences are between the competing products. They will then approve or reject at that point.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, if there is an outage and we do not get proper support from their technical team when we call them, in such a scenario we are looking at their competitors sooner.

We use it for storage. We have gotten really good performance out of it, fast IOPS.

We don't use the hybrid solution, or the built-in data migration capabilities, protocols, or DIP inline upgrades.

It's faster than our last storage system. It brings efficiencies with it. 

• Easy to configure
• Reliable

Very stable. We rarely have any types of issues or failures.

It's easy to scale, easy to add on to.

I have used technical support. I received good customer service and I was able to get my questions answered. It took them just a couple of hours to get back to me.

Our company, overall, has an Enterprise License Agreement with Dell EMC, so we transitioned off of older systems on to Dell EMC hardware. Our last storage solution was end-of-life so we wouldn't even have been able to get support through the original vendor, we would have had to go third-party. We decided not to do that, we decided to buy new.

The most important features when selecting a vendor are stability, scalability, and ease of use.

The initial setup was very easy to do. Straightforward.

Our support costs are less.

Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable. It would be nice if the cost was even lower.

NetApp and Nimble were on our shortlist.

We use it for running all our business workloads.

it allows us to grow service on demand.

Usually, we have pretty low latency. Our storage is less than 10ms, which is pretty good. No dramas there. That's pretty good performance.

For what it's doing today there isn't too much that I think they need to add to it. It's doing what it needs to do.

The stability is quite good. I have nothing but good things to say about it.

The scalability is pretty good. We have had no problems at this point.

Technical support is really good. We have had good, high-quality support with our SC Series. They respond quickly.

It's very similar to our previous storage, which made the transition to start using it easy. That was pretty good. We had been using EqualLogic storage. We switched because our old solution went end-of-life.

The setup was pretty good. We got the support people, Professional Services people, to come in and install it. It was fine.

It's definitely affordable. Of course, it would be better if they made it cheaper, even more affordable.

I rate it a nine out of ten. Nothing gets a ten.

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 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. 

We use it in our production and environmental support along with our VDI infrastructure. 

It has been working to our expectations.

Compared to some of the hardware that we support, from an infrastructure operator standpoint, I never had any problems with the system.

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

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

We have not had to scale yet.

We have found the solution to be affordable.

Do your research if you are looking into this product.

I am very happy with it.

We're a large financial institution and we use them at our branch sites. They're definitely not enterprise-grade, but where we need to have an all-flash solution for applications, and a smaller footprint, that's where we use them.

The performance has been excellent.

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. We got both a CapEx benefit and a benefit on the performance side.

Everything is sub-5ms for us. What I've found is that with all-flash, when an app from my business is slow, I pretty much know it's them and not me. It leads to a performance conversation that has really hit an interesting threshold point where we are better than what they need. So now we get to have that "refactoring your application" conversation a lot quicker because now the performance on the infrastructure side isn't in question anymore.

From an organizational perspective, the benefits are really around the decrease in performance-related issues. From an application perspective, when you think about incident management, those people are now spending their time very differently, where we have the SC Series deployed. It really has allowed us to advance a CapEx conversation, where our business partners, our LOBs, are actually behind us because they're seeing the benefit, real-time, in operations: the request for business cases to refresh environment instead of trying to sweat the current assets; now they're seeing the value prop. So we have a lot of people coming to the table supporting the expense, supporting that CapEx, perhaps a year or two sooner than they normally would have, because they understand.

Being a managing director I don't get "under the cover" as much as I used to, but what I can tell you from what my teams say is that it is a lot less intensive from a performance-troubleshooting perspective. The management software is a lot cleaner. We typically don't have performance issues anymore so our operations team gets to spend their time in different ways. We're getting to spend a lot more time thinking about how to deploy more efficiently and how to be creative about I/O profiles and tiering, in ways that we didn't get to do before, because we were troubleshooting performance issues, issues that we don't have now because of all-flash.

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. What I've found is that when it comes to the "enablement wrapper," that's what I like to call it, or the "services wrapper," that is wrapped around this whole idea of a transition from legacy to new, 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.

So far, I haven't had an incident, so the stability is good. No downtime.

It scales as well as the previous mid-range capability we had. I think for us, because we're in a situation where we're in flux between fiber channel and IP, I'm probably not the best person to relate to this question because a lot of our scalability issues have more to do with the network transformation that we're under and less so with the product.

We have in the neighborhood of 15,000 VMs.

We always invest. We're on a five-year depreciation cycle. At year-five, we do an evaluation of whether or not, from a refresh perspective, we need to move forward. The virtualization that's going on in our data center impacts that. In addition, we are green-fielding right now to software-defined storage, so some of these solutions are actually considered legacy right now. Applications are not refactoring at the same rate at which there is a desire to become software-defined, so we still have physical servers, some of which rely on fiber channel. Some of them, we can't even get to refactor into IP-based storage, even if it were still using a monolithic array. We have to provide our customers with what they need, so the need to invest has to do with meeting our customers' demands.

When looking at a vendor the most important criteria for me, specifically, are stability and reliability. Performance would be second, but stability and reliability are ultimately the most important thing. We have mission-critical applications and they just cannot fail.

To be honest with you, as a financial institution, I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about ROI. We are so large, and our scale is so huge, that the economics that we're able to get out of Dell EMC when we go to the table, are quite remarkable.

For us, once you put a five-year depreciation cycle on top of that, we really don't have an ROI issue. What we're really about is ease of management, about automation, about understanding performance impacts, and that densification piece which really helps to pay the bill. 

The one thing I can say, from an ROI perspective, is that the overall densification increase that we've seen, because of how flash seems to be operating with some of these application profiles, has definitely lead to a much better ROI. But it's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

The partnership that we have with Dell EMC is great, so we always get to a solution that is affordable. We are A Dell EMC shop and we have been for a long time. A lot of that is not just because of the strength of the brand. A lot of that is because they build the best storage. For us, being enterprise-critical and having applications that process lots of transactions every day, we can't take chances on our applications and the ability of our storage to be reliant. Performance is important. Cost is absolutely important, but we're always willing to spend a little bit more for what we consider to be the best.

We're a multi-vendor shop. We do that on purpose to make sure that each vendor gives us their best. HPE was on the shortlist as well as some, what I consider to be up-and-comers, like Pure. They had a play but it wasn't a serious play. When it got down to the last two, HPE was the competition.

Do your homework. Get in the lab. Figure out what it does and doesn't do. Figure out what's different. Understand your I/O profiles. Understand your applications. Think about how you want to best choose your app mix, when it comes to what's possible. Often, when people go all-flash for the first time, especially in the mid-range, they might be a little surprised at what's possible. Rack one up, fully populate it with disk, and really see what you can get out of it before you make assumptions around what you need and how your applications are going to behave.

We have not used the built-in capabilities for migration yet. What we're looking forward to is understanding the opportunity to possibly use these as a migration weigh-station between some of our older VMAXs or any of our other mid-tier storage platforms; where we might be able to use some of those migration solutions to help us get from legacy faster. We haven't done any migration between the two yet. All we've done is refresh tune-up.

I rate the solution an eight out of 10 because, overall, for the market that it's serving, it is just a really great product. For us, the extensibility that we've gotten in terms of being able to run multiple application workloads and still get a nice densification factor - and not have to worry a lot about over-provisioning and tiering or about a lot of the other things we used to have to worry about, thanks to the all-flash and the way that it operates - has been really nice. The management overhead is minimal. It just works. It's a workhorse.

We use it for storage for a virtual environment.

It has definitely improved our speed, storage space, and recovery times.

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

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

I would also like to see all-in-one appliances. That's what I'm here, at VMworld 2018, to look at.

The stability is okay, and the maintenance response time is excellent.

The scalability is endless.

Technical support is perfect. We use it all the time. 

We were using Dell EMC servers and then went to the virtual environment.

The most important factor for me, when selecting a vendor, is reliability. I have been using Dell EMC since day one and I'm not willing to switch at this point.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

The value that we've seen is a reduction in costs: virtualization versus physical servers.

It's a very affordable solution.

We do not use the hybrid solution yet.

I would rate the solution we are currently using at eight out of 10. Moving to the next performance level would make it a 10. And for this particular solution, the only thing I would like to see improved is the price.