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Dell SC Series vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
18th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (3rd)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
302
Ranking in other categories
NAS (6th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.7%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 2.9%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Steven McClendon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution uses newer technology for deduplication and compression."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"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."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"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."
"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."
"Dell SC Series' most valuable features are performance and network facilities. We have no issues with its integration. The tool helps to visualize servers."
"The product offers good performance and is quite powerful."
"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"This system has been (by far) the easiest to use, manage, and expand."
"This solution has allowed for massive performance acceleration of all workloads and massively increased availability (with peer persistence/transparent failover feature)."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is an enterprise storage that is mainly deployed in enterprise scenarios like banking and insurance."
"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."
"The technical support is very good."
"We can quickly see performance per CPG and per LUN. You can drill right down to see actual performance to the virtual volumes themselves. That's really good."
"We choose 3PAR for its speed. It's so fast and reliable."
"We use a virtual domain in 3PAR and we can create individual pools where clients are able to manage their own resources, instead of we, as storage admin, getting involved in that."
 

Cons

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics should not incur extra charges."
"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."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"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."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"Dell SC Series is no longer available, while Dell PowerStore, which supports NVMe over TCP, is different and not very affordable."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"If Dell SC Series could have supported the protocol NVMe over TCP, that would have been great. It does not."
"The cost of the solution could be better."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"The price could be improved."
"I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app."
"The onsite techs have caused outages."
"With 3PAR, there is remote copy software which isn't very good."
"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."
"An area of improvement for this solution is an increase in the bandwidth as well as an upgrade of the storage functionality and capabilities. The storage needs to be expandable for future-proofing."
"We did a firmware upgrade, and it brought the whole sandbox down. It was supposed to be done transparently, and that did not happen. It was not like we did it on our own; we had support set it up for us."
"The interface could be improved to match the system."
"I would like to see improvement in the product's scalability. As a partner, I had serious problems because of the competition from Dell EMC and Pure."
"I would like to see an automatic re-balancing system or functionality for adaptive optimization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 product is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."
"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."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"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."
"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."
"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."
"It's a very affordable solution."
"We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value."
"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 pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."
"The total cost of ownership really is worth every penny."
"We have seen ROI. We are able to see more patients now, bringing more money into the practice."
"The SSD is a little bit expensive."
"It is a little more money, but it is worth it because it does it better."
"The cost is reasonable given that the licensing is all included once you purchase it."
"The licensing fee is not cheap."
"It is fairly inexpensive to scale."
"It is a bit more expensive. IBM is cheaper than HPE in Turkey."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Educational Organization
87%
Computer Software Company
2%
Financial Services Firm
1%
Manufacturing Company
1%
 

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 needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?
Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...
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?
In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...
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...
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 ...
 

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

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.