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Dell SC Series pros and cons

Vendor: Dell Technologies

4.2 out of 5

52 reviews
94% willing to recommend

120 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Dell SC Series is recognized for its stability, scalability, and high-speed performance, making it powerful and reliable. Features like snapshots, replication, and data progression benefit storage strategies. It offers flexible configuration options for both all-flash and hybrid media types, enhancing storage capacity. Live Migrate and clustering new boxes increase operational flexibility. The cost-effective provisioning model does not require large initial investments, although technical support response time needs improvement and NVMe storage is not supported.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Dell SC Series is praised for its stability and scalability, ensuring it performs well under various conditions.

Technical support from Dell is highlighted as efficient, responsive, and knowledgeable, enhancing user satisfaction.

Features such as Live Migrate, data progression, and snapshot functionality are highly valued for their utility and effectiveness.

Dell SC Series offers a favorable price-performance ratio, making it a cost-effective choice for many users.

The ability to switch from hybrid to all-flash storage and vice versa provides flexible storage solutions, meeting diverse needs and contributing to its ease of management.

CONS

The 3000 model lacks duplication, which could burden performance.

The cost could be better, and future releases should reduce fees.

Support for NVMe storage is missing.

The initial setup is complex and should be simplified.

The architecture is old, and performance may lag.

Dell SC Series Pros review quotes

DW

Solutions Consultant at BlueAlly Technology Solutions

Sep 3, 2018

The most valuable feature is the no-forklift upgrade. While the thing is running, I can change out the controllers one at a time and keep the customer up and running. I can add shelves and storage and SSD drives or spinning drives to the system, while it's running. I can bring all that in and rebalance the load across the new disks or, if we take disks away, rebalance the load across what's remaining, and it just works.

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TP

Managing Director at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Sep 3, 2018

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.

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KS

reviewer1762782

Infrastructure Business Lead

Jan 18, 2022

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.

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Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 24, 2020

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

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ML

Senior Solutions Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Aug 29, 2018

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.

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BJ

Managing Director at Consult BenJ Ltd

Jul 22, 2020

The product offers good performance and is quite powerful.

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RM

Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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SG

reviewer1058013

Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 23, 2019

It is just as stable as any other high-end solution.

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TG

IT Architect at Synoptek

Sep 2, 2018

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.

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AP

Data Center Supervisor with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

With auto-tiering, it's easier to understand than most arrays, knowing that all of your writes go to the tier that you specify, with easy-to-create storage profiles.

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Dell SC Series Cons review quotes

DW

Solutions Consultant at BlueAlly Technology Solutions

Sep 3, 2018

We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell.

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TP

Managing Director at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Sep 3, 2018

Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us. In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal... Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful.

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KS

reviewer1762782

Infrastructure Business Lead

Jan 18, 2022

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?

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Storage Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 24, 2020

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

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BB

Systems Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

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.

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BJ

Managing Director at Consult BenJ Ltd

Jul 22, 2020

While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention.

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RM

Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 5, 2018

An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down.

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SG

reviewer1058013

Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Sep 23, 2019

I don't think the solution is very scalable.

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TG

IT Architect at Synoptek

Sep 2, 2018

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

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AP

Data Center Supervisor with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 2, 2018

I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Frame-Based Disk Arrays

All-Flash Storage

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Frame-Based Disk Arrays

All-Flash Storage

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell SC Series

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell SC Series

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs Dell SC Series

HPE Primera vs Dell SC Series

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Dell SC Series

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