Dell SC Series vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform comparison

Dell Technologies and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Frame-Based Disk Arrays category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.1. Additionally, 94% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Both Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Dell SC Series offer robust storage solutions, with each having unique advantages. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is favored for pricing and support, while Dell SC Series stands out due to its advanced features, making it considered worth the higher price.

Features: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is praised for its reliable performance, scalability, and advanced data protection features. Dell SC Series is noted for its automated tiering, easy management, and integration with VMware. Users highlight Hitachi's robust data protection, while Dell's automated tiering stands out, making it easier to optimize storage resources.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform could improve its integration capabilities and reduce costs. For Dell SC Series, users seek enhancements in reporting tools and better performance metrics. Hitachi needs better integration, while Dell could benefit from more refined reporting options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform generally receives positive feedback for smooth deployment and responsive customer service. Dell SC Series, while praised for a straightforward deployment process, sometimes faces criticism for slower customer service responses. Hitachi excels in customer support, whereas Dell's deployment ease is appreciated.

Pricing and ROI: Users find Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform to have a higher setup cost but indicate that the ROI is solid due to reliability and scalability. Dell SC Series is considered more cost-effective for initial setup, and users feel the long-term ROI justifies its advanced features. Hitachi might be pricier upfront, but its ROI is seen as strong; Dell is more budget-friendly on setup, with good ROI seen in feature utility.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

February 2025

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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

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

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

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."

"Dell SC Series offers a lot of performance, being one of the best performing storages Dell ever made."

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

"A 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."

"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."

"They have a feature called Live Migrate; it's been very, very useful."

"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."

More Dell SC Series pros

"The technical support is great."

"Data optimization, compression, and deduplication are the most important features for us."

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

"The hybrid array provides scaleable, predictable, high performance with no capacity constraints."

"This is one of the most stable, high-end solutions in this area."

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

"This is a good product with high capabilities and high reliability."

"It is robust. It doesn't need too much troubleshooting. It is a good device."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

Cons

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

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

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

"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."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

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

"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."

"The price could be improved."

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

"I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app."

"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."

"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"

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

"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."

More Dell SC Series cons

"The interface should be simplified and made easier to use."

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

"One improvement I am hoping for in the next release is unified storage."

"We moved away from this product because we were looking for an all-flash solution, and with our G1500 at the time, perhaps two years ago, they were just proposing more of the same technology."

"The deployment could be a bit easier, because it's a bit tricky"

"In the next version I would like to see more intelligence."

"The complex setup, ease of use, and snapshot operations of this product need to be improved."

"The complex setup phase is an area where improvements are needed."

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."

"The product is expensive."

"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."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

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

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

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

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Support typically depends on the array. It can range anywhere from $7,000 to a couple of hundred thousand dollars."

"We have found the solution to be affordable."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"It's absolutely affordable. Again, not having to do a forklift upgrade like some of the others have had to do in the past, it's very affordable for our customers and they continue to buy."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

"It is cheap. It is not very expensive. If you decide to expand the system, the cost is pretty low as compared to other vendors, such as Dell."

"The product is reasonably priced."

"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is a very expensive product."

"The costs were primarily in line with every other vendor at the time."

"The solution is expensive."

"It is expensive. Everything is included in the license. There is no additional cost."

"The main difference between Hitachi and other vendors is the cost. At the time that we bought the solution, it was the best option but the price, compared to other vendors, is a little high."

"Hitachi VSP's pricing is good compared to other brands."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

23%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

20%

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

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What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?

In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...

See all answers

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...

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

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

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 33% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Compared 70% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 11% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 13% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 12% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

February 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series

February 2025

Download Dell SC Series product report

Buyer's Guide

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

February 2025

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, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series

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.

Pure Storage

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.

Dell Technologies

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.

Hitachi Vantara

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

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

February 2025

Free Report: Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

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