Dell SC Series Reviews

I just use it for backups and file servers.

Mostly, the value is the price. It's not too expensive, but affordable. It permits the necessary support and functionality.

The interface could be better.

I have been using it for a couple of years.

The stability of this solution is dependent on where it is set up. So, it's dependent on the environment. Users could face disk failure. 

I don't have experience with scaling it.

It is suitable for small or medium businesses.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, where one is a difficult initial setup, and ten is easy.

Some menus aren't so intuitive. You have to really think about it or look around to do what you want to do.

The deployment takes a few days just to make sure the configuration is right.

I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

I would recommend it to others. 

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best.

We use it for storage. We have gotten really good performance out of it, fast IOPS.

We don't use the hybrid solution, or the built-in data migration capabilities, protocols, or DIP inline upgrades.

It's faster than our last storage system. It brings efficiencies with it. 

• Easy to configure
• Reliable

Very stable. We rarely have any types of issues or failures.

It's easy to scale, easy to add on to.

I have used technical support. I received good customer service and I was able to get my questions answered. It took them just a couple of hours to get back to me.

Our company, overall, has an Enterprise License Agreement with Dell EMC, so we transitioned off of older systems on to Dell EMC hardware. Our last storage solution was end-of-life so we wouldn't even have been able to get support through the original vendor, we would have had to go third-party. We decided not to do that, we decided to buy new.

The most important features when selecting a vendor are stability, scalability, and ease of use.

The initial setup was very easy to do. Straightforward.

Our support costs are less.

Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable. It would be nice if the cost was even lower.

NetApp and Nimble were on our shortlist.

It is used for storage purposes.

I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful.           

I would like to improve the processing ability. 

I have been using Dell SC Series for three years.

I would rate the stability of this solution eight out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability nine out of ten.

The customer support is very fast and reliable. 

Positive

The setup is easy comparatively and I would rate it seven out of ten.I engaged in researching vendor reports and comparing outputs with other options. I also attend vendor seminars to gather knowledge. So, while I'm responsible for the necessary preparation leading up to deployment, I'm not directly engaged in the deployment process itself.

There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional.

I would rate this solution nine out of ten and recommend it to bigger organizations.

Performance

Compellent is a very easy-to-use solution because after the first installation you have no more parameters to fix. You can add discs easily and all discs are in one group or folder. It is also very easy to expand. 

The solution is very complete as you can use it as solo for primary storage for production, and you want to implement a cluster with two storage systems, all you need is include it in the software of the storage system. So it's easy and very efficient, and when I have to choose a solution for a customer, I must find out what kind of security the customer wants. When I use this solution, I have all kinds of installation possibilities. So, for me, it is a very good solution.

When we installed this solution, we were surprised by how stable and efficient it is.

For me, there is only one limitation with the scalability of the solution. When you have the solution with two controllers, and you add a lot of SSD, you reach a limit. You have to use your system in his linear opérating zone. when you add discs, you add IOPS and storage space. there is a saturation point of the controller beyond which you add only storage space but no more IOPS, the limit point is reached  and the limit is almost 60 discs. You can put in 200 discs, mostly at once. This point limit the scalability of the full flash solution with only one system. you can add another system in fédération mode to exceed this limit.

I am very impressed by the simplicity of the solution. They have very good support system called CoPilot. Whenever I contact them, they are very efficient. Whenever a customer calls them, they immediately take his problem in account wihout going through a support level 1; we are immediately in contact whith expert.

We work on different solutions. The most important point for me is how is implemented disc virtualization. In this solution, disc management is really very simple and disc utilisation is efficient. all disc are add in a group and raid is oragnized on 2Mo stripe. The stripe are organizer in 2 raid automatically : by default, 20% in raid 10 to write blocs with very effective performane and 80% raid5 to store data with a good use of space.When you add many disks in the folder their are automatically integrated in the profile and add performance to production. The possibility to implement two system in a cluster and can also be integrated in a federate mode to agregate multiple system in one global storage.

My advice to others would be to get the demo to test the solution out. On a scale of one to ten, my rating is a ten. Simplicity and stability are very important for me, and this solution is very simple to use, it's very efficient and a customer won't make many mistakes when using it. 

In the future, I would like to see better monitoring so that we can give to the customer an indication of their capacity to upgrade. These kinds of tools must be very user-friendly - especially for those customers that didn't study storage functionality in detail. 

Regarding our use cases of Dell EMC SC Series, from a core perspective, we are going to phase out Oracle and move to SAP HANA. Oracle was part of our SAP legacy architecture, so we are migrating it to HANA. From a business perspective, we have a couple of Microsoft SQL-based applications that are using the SQL database and which we have for on-the-go users. Our core business is running on SAP and then, from a legacy structure, we have a bit of Microsoft SQL and the rest is on Microsoft. 

The technology was declared end of sale last year, so we switched to the newer PowerStore, but we still have the SC Series working and functioning in test and dev. If I'm not mistaken, we got the updated code as well. Our agreement is extended, but we don't plan to continue with it because we've already shifted the workload onto PowerStore. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

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. 

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? 

I have been using this solution since 2013. 

The performance was staggering and it was more than what we paid for. We were able to bring a lot of juice out from the SC Series. It took us some time, but we were able to get a higher performance once we understood the technology. 

The SC Series was very low maintenance, which was one thing that we liked. We had Phone Home enabled, so we were getting all the patches from Dell. They were also able to help us from a drive failure perspective. Nothing went wrong with it—it was a good experience, which is why we are still sticking with Dell. 

The scalability was one of our main purchasing decision data points. We wanted the architecture, which is highly clustered, and which gave us the scale up and scale out altogether. It was good. We never intended to go beyond 500 to 600 terabytes, but from a scalability perspective, it really proved its worth. 

We are happy with Dell's technical support, which is one of the reasons why we stuck with Dell when the SC Series was coming to end of life. We explored other vendors as well, but we are comfortable with Dell. 

On a scale from one to five, I would rate them a five. When we were in the midst of rolling out our containerized app for our mobile users, we had an issue. It was our own application issue and had nothing to do with them, but they came forward with a lot of APIs. From a data perspective, they even got one of their engineers to work and to support our application team. From a hardware perspective, they were able to come in and help us on our application, which is why I rate them a five. 

From an acquisition perspective, it was very straightforward. From an implementation perspective, we had a little difficulty because it was a newer technology. From our admin perspective, it was not something that they were equipped with, so initially we had hiccups. However, I believe that this is fair for every new technology. 

The automation part wasn't there, so we had hoped that we could automate it back in when we were acquiring it. We felt that this would've made our life easier, but we only came to realize this when we migrated our workloads from SC to the newer generation of PowerStore—it provided all the automation and everything that was missing on day one from an SC Series. 

If I were to rate the initial setup on a scale from one to five, I'd put it at a four, from a technology perspective. From an internal perspective, I would rate us a three, but the shortcomings were on our end, in terms of internal skill building. The DSM, Dell Storage Manager, really came in handy, but we didn't know how to best leverage it. 

For the deployment, we actually got the partner to come in and work with our team. We also leveraged Dell, but it was mainly from a documentation perspective. We didn't have any issues where we had to go and seek support or help, but it was our internal staff which slowed us down, not the platform or the product itself. 

The SC Series was priced fairly. I wouldn't call it either expensive or cheap because we had a very tight budget, so if they were able to fit in that type of budget, they met our expectations. 

I rate the SC Series a 10 out of 10 because it was a lifesaver. One of the use cases that we had, where we found it really gave us an edge, was back in 2015. There was a compliance requirement where we had to roll out a lot of old logs and data. We had it sitting on the old 2TB SATA drive, the slowest drive possible. We always worried about how we were going to get the data since we were using all-flash and archiving on the slowest 2TB drives, but when the stacking came, it really gave us all the data without any purchase—the tiering feature really shone at that time. So, that is one of the reasons why we trust and love this product. 

If the SC Series was still in use, I would honestly recommend it to others, at any given time. When we moved out from business critical workloads, away from SC Series, we did a lot of crazy testing. It gave us the capability to get a lot of performance out and it was very flexible. If it was still there, we would still be buying more of it. 

The solution is used for shared storage for the ESX cluster, VMware, or Vcenter cluster. It's a virtual machine and it's hosting space for virtual service. The primary reason we use the solution is to host the core infrastructure, the virtual servers including file servers, domain controllers, application servers, sequel servers, etc. Basically, the servers that run the business.

The solution's most valuable feature is its performance redundancy. The solution works quite well for that. The redundancy is important to us for snapshot and recovery purposes.

The product offers good performance and is quite powerful. 

The implementation is straightforward. 

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.

I've been using the solution on and off for over a decade. It's been about 12 years at this point. However, I should note that I don't use it every day. 

The stability of the solution is good. There don't seem to be any issues with reliability. There aren't bugs or glitches. It works well.

The solution is targeted at small to medium businesses, I would say. It's usually something that you would put in and expand on, so, in that sense, yes, it is scalable to a degree. 

However, it is not infinitely scalable. That's not a criticism. You just need to buy the right product in the first place. I don't have any problems recommending it for companies of a certain size that may need to expand a bit.

We contact technical support all the time, so we've been in touch on multiple occasions. They are very good. They're responsive and knowledgeable. They help us when we have issues. We're very satisfied with the level of service they provide.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. It's not complex by any means.

The time it takes to deploy the solution depends on how big it is. It's difficult to say exactly how long it will take as each company is different. At the most, it might take three days, however, it depends on where it is and what has to be set up. Right from out of the box users can start putting data on the storage. 

We handle the implementation for our clients. On top of that, wherever we've been asked to either install or work with Compellent SAN, there's usually someone on site who is trained to do basic maintenance and tasks of that nature.

I don't really have experience across different vendors. 

I'm a contractor and a Dell partner; I help implement the solution for clients, however, I'm not a reseller. I help fix and update the solution and occasionally maintain the product for clients. In my experience, the solution is usually deployed either on-premise within the office or the head office, or quite often in a co-located data center.

I would recommend the solution, however, only if it made sense for the individual company. It's not right for everyone and it would depend on the situation. A company considering implementing it should always check their requirements.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. Now and then, they do break and you do have to replace them. With any solution, something always goes wrong at some point. That's not a mark against this particular product. I don't believe any product is perfect.

The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business. 

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

I have used this solution for one year. 

The initial setup was complex, specifically when integrating this solution with other technology. The deployment was easier and offered flexibility. Before deployment, I would suggest checking other technology to ensure there is compatibility. 

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

I would recommend this solution for customers looking for Unity or PowerStore functionality.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our clients. We have deployed it for more than seven customers

It is used for several purposes including server consolidation and business applications. 

The most valuable features are the efficiency and replication.

This solution is easy to use.

Dell offers a good warranty on this product.

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

Although the pricing is competitive, it is a concern because competitors such as HP are also competitive.

We have been using Compellent for two years.

Compellent is a stable solution.

This is a very scalable product.

The technical support is reasonable but I feel that the turnaround time is very high and can be improved.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is complex but straightforward. It takes approximately 45 minutes to configure.

The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive.

The pricing for solutions by HP is also competitive.

I definitely recommend Compellent to my customers because it is a very good product that is very scalable, it is easy to use, and Dell offers a good warranty. I find the features handy and it is a good match for my customers' requirements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.