Dell SC Series vs NetApp FAS Series comparison

Dell Technologies and NetApp are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Additionally, 94% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and NetApp FAS Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell SC Series vs. NetApp FAS Series Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. NetApp FAS Series

April 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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Paweł Jabłoński

IT Infrastructure Manager at Bricoman Wilanów

Used for VMs with replication a feature, but need upgraded SSDs

We use this solution. I configured and updated it. Of course, I was also a user of applications that store data on that storage. We already have an SSD solution. So, rather than planning to go with an SSD solution, we are focusing on expanding it. If a company wants to deploy something new, it should choose a product with SSD, and NVMe disks. Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

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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 most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"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'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."

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

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

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The solution is stable."

"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 was very easy to install, maintain, and provides excellent manageability."

"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."

"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."

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

"It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication."

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

More Dell SC Series pros

"The migration of the volume on the cluster is very useful and easy to use."

"The support is very good."

"The solution is stable."

"The most valuable feature for us is the combining of HA and SnapMirror."

"The solution is easy to use."

"One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments."

"The strong point is that our clients like this are RadLV (Radiology Low-Value). They also use SnapMirror and MetroCluster."

"One important feature for customers is its ease of use and continuity, enabling seamless usage across on-premise and cloud environments."

More NetApp FAS Series pros

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"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."

"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."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

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

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."

"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"

"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."

"This solution could be improved if overall performance was improved and operated with a higher speed and supported a higher volume of RAM."

"Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage."

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

"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."

More Dell SC Series cons

"As I see it, there could be more interfaces, more cache, etc."

"There was a bug when creating new custom roles that automatically gave volume deletion permission, which was a problem, but they finally fixed it."

"The NetApp FAS Series is not as high-performing and is not as fast. Its speed needs improvement, but this could only be done if it's an all-flash solution."

"Its operating system is very cumbersome. However, after you set it up, it runs pretty smoothly. Its file system is not very dynamic. It is very static."

"It lacks automatic tiering, When you use data, some of it goes cold. It is not hot data, so the system should automatically move that data to the SATA, while the hot data is kept on tier-one, the SaaS or SSD drives."

"The WAFL is slow."

"The solution's configuration is not flexible."

"NetApp FAS Series should introduce an FTP application for the broadcast and post-production market."

More NetApp FAS Series cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive."

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

"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."

"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 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."

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

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"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."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"We have the basic license for the use of this solution and it is a permanent license. The overall cost could be less, it is expensive."

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

"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."

"The pricing of this solution is competitive."

"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."

"It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features."

"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 pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

"it’s not an inexpensive solution and it may not be for the cost-sensitive customer."

"Low-priced product, but pricing could still be made more attractive."

"NetApp FAS Series is a reasonably high-priced solution, partially because we select the configuration that duplicates the entire system."

"The licensing cost is on yearly basis."

"NetApp FAS Series' pricing is competitive."

"The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is reasonable for its performance."

"The product's pricing is reasonable."

"The pricing of NetApp FAS Series is not cheap, but in comparison to other vendors, NetApp FAS Series is affordable because they also have deduplication, compression, and inline compression. They focus on storage only, which is really good; it works."

More NetApp FAS Series pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Educational Organization

59%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software 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.

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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.

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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...

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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...

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Which SAN product would you choose: IBM FlashSystem (FS9500) vs PureFlash Array/X NVMe vs PureFlash Array/XL NVMe?

Have you considered a NetApp FAS Storage for your NAS needs? I am sure it fits very well.

See all answers

What do you like most about NetApp FAS Series?

Flexibility in data replication.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp FAS Series?

Cost is a big factor in our decision-making process. When we're buying storage, the first thing we look at is how muc...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 32% 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 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 7% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Compared 60% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 22% of the time

HPE MSA vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 8% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs NetApp FAS Series

Compared 6% of the time

More NetApp FAS Series Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series

April 2025

Download Dell SC Series product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp FAS Series

March 2025

Download NetApp FAS Series product report

Also Known As

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

SC Series Storage, Compellent

No data available

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

NetApp FAS series is an enterprise-level storage system that provides a wide variety of data management services, including data protection, block and file storage, and data management.

NetApp FAS is designed to be highly scalable, allowing your organization to grow storage capacity on demand. NetApp FAS also supports multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel, as well as various storage architectures, including SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network-Attached Storage).

The FAS series has multiple data protection and data management features, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication, to help secure your data and manage it more efficiently. The system integrates with other NetApp products and solutions, to create a unified data management platform. The system can be deployed on-premise, on multi-cloud environments, or hybrid.

NetApp FAS Series Benefits and Features

NetApp FAS series provides its users with several key benefits and features, including:

Scalability: NetApp FAS series is easy to scale, allowing organizations to rapidly grow their storage capacity according to demand.

Security: Protect and manage your data with various data protection and data management tools, including snapshots, cloning, replication, and deduplication.

Seamless integration: Integrate with other NetApp products and solutions to ensure a unified data management platform across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Reduced costs: Consolidation of multiple storage boxes greatly reduces the data center footprint. From a management point of view, with NetApp FAS you manage a single storage box instead of multiple storage boxes.
Compatibility: Forward and backward compatibility ensures that you don’t have to trade in existing controllers. New controllers can always integrate with previously released controllers.

Multi-protocol support: Support for multiple protocols, including NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

High performance and availability: The solution has high input and output per second performance and ensures that critical data remains accessible in the event of a hardware failure.
Intuitive interface: The FAS series has a user-friendly interface and management dashboard, making it easy to manage your storage systems. With unified management, you can quickly run a single protocol on your entire system
Data cloning and replication: Easily clone databases of any size. Clones occupy a very, very small footprint on the storage until they are severed from the main database. Replications carried out by the system are fast and require very little bandwidth.

Reviews from Real Users

NetApp FAS Series stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its speed, reliability, and a wide variety of features.

Adriano S., IT project and infrastructure service manager, writes, “The replication feature is noteworthy because it's faster than most and it uses little bandwidth. Then there's the friendly interface that the equipment offers. With this interface, it is very easy to manage.”

Temitope O., a NetApp product manager at Hiperdist Ltd, says, “I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system. You rather have a system for a particular protocol and another system for other protocols, especially in a big environment like mine.”

NetApp

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Children's Hospital Central California, Plex Systems, PDF PNI Digital Media, Denver Broncos, PDF KSM Legal, Clayton Companies, Virginia Community College

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. NetApp FAS Series

April 2025

Free Report: Dell SC Series vs. NetApp FAS Series

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