Dell SC Series Reviews

I've used Dell SC Series at other companies as a good storage tier for servers for VMware and on HP UX servers as well.

It is unfortunate Dell is phasing out the SC Series. It includes cost savings for customers since it intelligently determines where to put data over time.

Basically, we have several servers, both physical and virtual. I have VMware deployed here, where I allocate storage to consolidate servers and provide storage facilities. Similarly, on the physical servers, I provide storage for end servers for data and file servers, and for database services like Dell.

I can deploy different types of hard disks, including SSDs. I can mix and match the drives, using older mechanical devices and the latest SFP drives in a single solution with different enclosures. The system automatically shifts hot and cold data according to usage, with features like resilient hardware and controllers. Cost reduction is part of my process. I negotiate and evaluate solutions from various vendors before finalizing a purchase, with Dell providing the best prices and overall hardware.

I primarily used Dell SC Series for databases and virtual machines. It's very effective for maintaining a data center.

Dell SC Series offers a lot of performance, being one of the best performing storages Dell ever made. It was very easy to install, maintain, and provides excellent manageability. The storage also lowered the response time of disks across the entire farm, making it a great product for operational efficiency.

We use it for multiple databases. We use it for Oracle and for SQL. We also use it for file systems — Oracle, SQL, file system storage. Most of our use cases involve Oracle, SQL, VMware, and large file systems.

I am a storage architect. have a state administrator that works with me as well.

Internally, within our company, there are a few dozen employees using this solution. Externally, we literally have millions of people that hit that storage system every day.

As far as our database administrators, they're always looking at the storage performance. Some of them actually have read-only log-ins to the storage array itself. They can log in and look at directly what the storage performance is for their database.

Currently, we are not using this solution extensively because it's becoming a sunset solution. There's no option to increase usage. It's like saying you want to buy a '65 Mustang — no, you can't get one brand new, they don't make those anymore. There's no expansion being done because the product's no longer available. 

It's allowed us to have one hundred percent uptime over the last five years — maybe more. One hundred percent uptime on our storage as far as quantitative numbers go.

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.

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.

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.

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.