Dell SC Series vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ comparison

Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Dell Technologies is ranked #18 with an average rating of 9.0, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell Technologies holds a 0.8% mindshare in AFS, compared to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell SC Series are two major players in the enterprise storage market. While HPE 3PAR StoreServ is favored for its consistent performance and robust features, Dell SC Series stands out with superior scalability and lower initial costs.

Features: Users value HPE 3PAR StoreServ for its high availability, ease of management, and advanced data reduction capabilities. Dell SC Series is noted for its dynamic enterprise features like automated tiering, solid integration with diverse environments, and superior scalability, offering better flexibility for growing businesses.

Room for Improvement: HPE 3PAR StoreServ could benefit from better integration with third-party tools, a more intuitive configuration process, and enhanced firmware updates. Dell SC Series requires improvements in firmware updates, analytics tools, and customer support processes. While both products need technical enhancements, HPE 3PAR StoreServ users report fewer critical issues and a more stable experience overall.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: HPE 3PAR StoreServ is known for its straightforward deployment process and strong vendor support, providing comprehensive training and resources. Dell SC Series offers various deployment models but users mention occasional complexities during setup. Dell's customer service is reliable but not as hands-on as HPE's, with many users finding HPE to be more responsive to support needs and easier to implement.

Pricing and ROI: HPE 3PAR StoreServ typically entails higher initial setup costs but delivers significant ROI through consistent performance and lower operational expenses. Dell SC Series is more cost-effective upfront with reasonable ongoing costs, providing good long-term ROI. Despite the higher initial price, HPE users feel the investment is justified by its superior capabilities and reliability.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

January 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

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 2.9%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage

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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Muhammad Saqib

System Engineer at Hybrid Tech

Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.

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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

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

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

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

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

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Everything is sub-5 MS 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."

"There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and have it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is going to add not only space but performance to the array, with 7.3."

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

"The interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly."

"It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving to that direction."

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

"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."

"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."

More Dell SC Series pros

"Provides High-Availability, security, and high performance"

"We use for our tier one and two apps, so they can do failover, synchronous replication."

"Our applications are now at least two to four times faster."

"We have much better performance than we managed earlier and are now saving lots of space."

"The most valuable feature for me is the solution's availability."

"Previously, we were using EVA from HPE. When we moved to 3PAR, we noticed a reduction in footprint, reduced by more than 30%. We use the Adaptive Optimization, giving us a reduction in cost and with better performance."

"You can scale it out almost indefinitely."

"From a single panel, I can see the performance of my service, my network, and my storage."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pros

Cons

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

"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."

"Some menus aren't so intuitive."

"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."

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

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

"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."

"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."

"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."

More Dell SC Series cons

"There are some weird things that we can't figure out."

"We would like to see a bigger integration with the Nimble Storage solution, so we can take our smaller regional companies and be able to send them into our bigger data centers and have everything work seamlessly."

"The performance of the solution is not good anymore and the software is different from all the other types and is not compatible. There are more negative things at this moment than positive. This is why we are removing them all from our organization this year."

"We are using a built-in solution in 3PAR. We are using All-Flash Storage, and there are some difficulties with it. HPE has now developed a new tool system to support All-Flash, and that's why we are changing our investment. They must increase its performance. I want unlimited support, which is very important for performance. I am not interested in spinning disks. HPE is developing new storage systems called Primera, but they must be developed more."

"HPE 3PAR StoreServ should increase the storage capacity."

"I'd really it to be able to interact with older 3PAR storage, and possibly even non-HPE. I would like to be able to pull stuff off of old things and bring it up to the standard that has been set, simply, quickly, and efficiently. That would be a really nice feature. Right now it is a big pain. It seems to work but we tend to get some latency behind."

"I would like to see more cloud-based integrations and more file storage capabilities."

"Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The product is expensive."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

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

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

"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 licensing is on a yearly basis."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"We have found the solution to be affordable."

"The pricing of this solution is competitive."

"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 pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive."

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

"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."

"The scalability seems a bit more expensive than even buying a brand new one so far. That has been kind of a drawback."

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

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

"You need to properly assess your needs before buying the solution since there are chances of overpaying. The type of configuration that you choose can make the price go higher or lower."

"We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution."

"They have added features, such as the compression and duplication, which have further increased our ROI."

"To be more competitive, as customer, we need a more aggressive price that includes all the licenses available."

"The licensing fee is not cheap."

"It is fairly inexpensive to scale."

"For the price that we were able to acquire it, we have seen it give us the performance and stability that we require to run our enterprise."

"The price of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is reasonable, but buying upgrade licenses are priced very high. There are additional fees."

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user182013

Federal Civ/Intel Engineering Lead at Rubrik

May 1, 2015

Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR

Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…

Read full review

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

Educational Organization

86%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

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 ...

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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...

See all answers

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...

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What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?

HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...

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What do you like most about HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

The compression features are good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?

It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...

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

HPE Primera vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 21% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 20% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 7% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 6% of the time

HPE MSA vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE 3PAR StoreServ 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

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Buyer's Guide

HPE 3PAR StoreServ

February 2025

Download HPE 3PAR StoreServ product report

Also Known As

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

SC Series Storage, Compellent

HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage

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

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an AI-driven storage solution that prevents issues before they occur by learning and adjusting in real time. The solution offers a tier-1 all-flash foundation for mission-critical workloads. HPE 3PAR StoreServ was designed with more than 3M IOPS and consistent sub-ms latency. It aims to transform midrange and enterprise deployments with solutions that scale from a few TBs to more than 20PBs. In addition, the solution is built to modernize data centers and is made to handle unpredictable workloads effortlessly. By implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you gain automated and rapid provisioning, hardware-accelerated deduplication and compression, and a multi-tenant design.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Features

HPE 3PAR StoreServ has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Flexibility: With HPE 3PAR StoreServ, you can easily deploy highly configurable, scale-out storage for multi-tenant workloads.

Always-on availability for your data: HPE 3PAR StoreServ includes an always-on resilient storage infrastructure for your hypervisors and applications. In addition, with Peer Persistence, your virtual machines (VMs), hosts, and data can move freely across data centers rather than being constrained by their physical boundaries.

Fast, scalable performance: HPE 3PAR StoreServ enables you to accelerate consistent mixed-workload performance and also provides necessary QoS levels that are optimized for your highest priority applications.

Performance insights: HPE 3PAR StoreServ helps you gain performance insights in real time, and anticipate as well as prevent issues across the infrastructure stack by utilizing cross-stack analytics.

Flash optimized data protection: With tier-1 data services, multi-tenant security, and copy data management, you can avoid downtime.

Seamless data mobility: HPE 3PAR StoreServ makes it possible for you to not only experience converged data protection, but also experience seamless data mobility services, at flash speed, from the edge to the cloud.

HPE 3PAR StoreServ Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing HPE 3PAR StoreServ. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to manage. The web interface to manage the units is a great asset and one that makes managing storage easy.

User-friendly GUI

Exceptionally fast and well-managed replication
Low latency

Hybrid storage gives you the ability to assign different roles to different types of storage arrays inside one enclosure

Both file-level and block-level replication

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the HPE 3PAR StoreServ solution.

A SAN Consultant at a tech services company says, “One of the features that I like the most is the data replication element. The reason I like it is due to the fact that it's pretty clean on replicating data over to a second site. The product stands on its own in heavy enterprise environments. It's easy to make changes without affecting the environment. The solution is very easy to use. The product is very robust and offers very good performance.”

A Storage Manager at a financial services firm mentions, "There are a lot of screens for easy management where you can change some settings. But after a few years, the important settings were better after an upgrade, and all the vendors have other ways to upgrade their systems."

A Senior IT Infrastructure & Data Center Operation Engineer at Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) comments, “The adaptive optimization is the biggest feature in 3PAR. 3PAR is very usable with thin volume because it detects zeros while writing. Every time I tell the hypervisor to make the full provisioning, it makes the volume as simple provisioning in 3PAR, not full provisioning.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

January 2025

Free Report: Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ

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