Dell SC Series vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform comparison

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Steven McClendon

Data Center Server & Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering

I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.

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Ozair Amin

Sales Manager - Infrastructure at Synergy Computers

A robust and dependable product that ensures a 100 percent data availability guarantee

We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products. Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes. The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings. Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand. I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others. There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers. The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues. The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive. Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service. The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions. In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task. Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I appreciate the performance."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"In terms of stability, it's good enough. It's okay."

"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."

"Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms."

"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."

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

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

"The setup and installation is much simpler now, because Dell has standardized the configure process."

"It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."

More Dell SC Series pros

"The valuable features for data management include deduplication and compression without performance impact, and the ability to virtualize old storage, making migration seamless."

"It's best features are its reliability and stability."

"The performance was decent."

"The feature I like best is the stability of the hardware."

"The product has great data storage performance with a 100% data security and availability guarantee."

"It's a state of the art solution in storage systems. High-availability and performance are the strongest aspects of these machines."

"The product provides a good storage space."

"The most valuable features in Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series are Shadowimage, easy to manage equipment, and upgrading the firewire is very simple."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

Cons

"We need better data deduplication."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

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

"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 call 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."

"Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, as to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines"

"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."

"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 those things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur."

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

"The cost of the solution could be better."

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

More Dell SC Series cons

"The user interface should be made simpler because it is difficult to manage."

"The software has always been lagging a bit compared to the newer features. It usually takes a cycle for it to catch up."

"There is a drawback related to Hitachi's configuration flexibility. The Hitachi storage platform solution is not flexible. That means that both the Hitachi and the partner presale guys have to do a lot of work to design a solution."

"I would like the fan noise to be automatically adjusted based on the drive's current workload."

"n future releases, I would like to see enhancements in the web GUI capabilities for direct management without additional PCM."

"This product should be easier to install and set up."

"One problem is that there are too many management tools for the F Series and for all the other Hitachi storage systems. There are four or five such solutions. Maybe these could be combined in the future."

"It seemed like every time we turned around it was a statement of work and we'd have to pay for something that our previous vendors would not have billed us for."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The product is expensive."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"Always keep in mind, this is not just a enclosure with disks is a complete SAN as a service. There is software, license, and storage in one single solution."

"The SC Series was priced fairly. I wouldn't call it either expensive or cheap because we had a very tight budget, so if they were able to fit in that type of budget, they met our expectations."

"There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional."

"The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive."

"This solution could be better priced in comparison with other vendors."

"The pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

"Architecture-wise, it's actually at a competitive price point. It is not cheap."

"The solution is expensive."

"The product is reasonably priced."

"The price per gigabyte is good and it is low when it comes to terabytes."

"It is expensive as compared to other vendors, but its price is good if you are looking for stability, reliability, performance, and security."

"Pricing could be better, because the cost is very high."

"It is a little expensive."

"When you are looking for high-end solutions such as this, price is less important than stability and availability."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

23%

University

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive.

What do you like most about Dell SC Series?

I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?

Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...

What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?

If Dell SC Series could have supported the protocol NVMe over TCP, that would have been great. It does not. Additiona...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?

For NVMe storage, the pricing is reasonable compared to competitors in India. However, for entry-level SAN storage or...

What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.

What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

Hitachi should work on unified storage for the SMB market and entry-level NAS storage, similar to what HP or Dell off...

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Comparisons

Compared 38% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Compared 68% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Dell SC Series

Download Dell SC Series product report

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Download Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

SC Series Storage, Compellent

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform N Series, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series

Learn More

Pure Storage

Dell Technologies

Hitachi Vantara

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Dell EMC SC Series arrays provide a unified platform for the ultimate in performance, adaptability and machine-driven efficiency. SC Series software delivers modern features that help you meet aggressive workload demands using the fewest drives necessary. With an open, future-ready design, SC Series storage integrates seamlessly with applications and infrastructure, enabling you to scale on a single platform and add capabilities without forklift upgrades.

RETHINK YOUR DEFINITION OF SPEED AND PERFORMANCE

With adaptive, guaranteed data reduction and a 100% data-availability guarantee, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F series helps you tackle complicated business challenges. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) VSP F series delivers up to 4.8M IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.
Featuring legendary Hitachi reliability, VSP F series arrays are backed by the industries only 100% availability guarantee. For these reasons, 80% of the Fortune 500 choose Hitachi all-flash arrays to accelerate the performance of mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Virtualization, Microsoft apps etc. With over 350 patents in flash technology, Hitachi’s innovative mix of flash hardware and software accelerates ROI with enterprise-class reliability and performance.

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform