Dell SC Series Reviews

We're a large financial institution and we use them at our branch sites. They're definitely not enterprise-grade, but where we need to have an all-flash solution for applications, and a smaller footprint, that's where we use them.

The performance has been excellent.

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. We got both a CapEx benefit and a benefit on the performance side.

Everything is sub-5ms 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.

From an organizational perspective, the benefits are really around the decrease in performance-related issues. From an application perspective, when you think about incident management, those people are now spending their time very differently, where we have the SC Series deployed. It really has allowed us to advance a CapEx conversation, where our business partners, our LOBs, are actually behind us because they're seeing the benefit, real-time, in operations: the request for business cases to refresh environment instead of trying to sweat the current assets; now they're seeing the value prop. So we have a lot of people coming to the table supporting the expense, supporting that CapEx, perhaps a year or two sooner than they normally would have, because they understand.

Being a managing director I don't get "under the cover" as much as I used to, but what I can tell you from what my teams say is that it is a lot less intensive from a performance-troubleshooting perspective. The management software is a lot cleaner. We typically don't have performance issues anymore so our operations team gets to spend their time in different ways. We're getting to spend a lot more time thinking about how to deploy more efficiently and how to be creative about I/O profiles and tiering, in ways that we didn't get to do before, because we were troubleshooting performance issues, issues that we don't have now because of all-flash.

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. What I've found is that when it comes to the "enablement wrapper," that's what I like to call it, or the "services wrapper," that is wrapped around this whole idea of a transition from legacy to new, 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.

So far, I haven't had an incident, so the stability is good. No downtime.

It scales as well as the previous mid-range capability we had. I think for us, because we're in a situation where we're in flux between fiber channel and IP, I'm probably not the best person to relate to this question because a lot of our scalability issues have more to do with the network transformation that we're under and less so with the product.

We have in the neighborhood of 15,000 VMs.

We always invest. We're on a five-year depreciation cycle. At year-five, we do an evaluation of whether or not, from a refresh perspective, we need to move forward. The virtualization that's going on in our data center impacts that. In addition, we are green-fielding right now to software-defined storage, so some of these solutions are actually considered legacy right now. Applications are not refactoring at the same rate at which there is a desire to become software-defined, so we still have physical servers, some of which rely on fiber channel. Some of them, we can't even get to refactor into IP-based storage, even if it were still using a monolithic array. We have to provide our customers with what they need, so the need to invest has to do with meeting our customers' demands.

When looking at a vendor the most important criteria for me, specifically, are stability and reliability. Performance would be second, but stability and reliability are ultimately the most important thing. We have mission-critical applications and they just cannot fail.

To be honest with you, as a financial institution, I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about ROI. We are so large, and our scale is so huge, that the economics that we're able to get out of Dell EMC when we go to the table, are quite remarkable.

For us, once you put a five-year depreciation cycle on top of that, we really don't have an ROI issue. What we're really about is ease of management, about automation, about understanding performance impacts, and that densification piece which really helps to pay the bill. 

The one thing I can say, from an ROI perspective, is that the overall densification increase that we've seen, because of how flash seems to be operating with some of these application profiles, has definitely lead to a much better ROI. But it's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

The partnership that we have with Dell EMC is great, so we always get to a solution that is affordable. We are A Dell EMC shop and we have been for a long time. A lot of that is not just because of the strength of the brand. A lot of that is because they build the best storage. For us, being enterprise-critical and having applications that process lots of transactions every day, we can't take chances on our applications and the ability of our storage to be reliant. Performance is important. Cost is absolutely important, but we're always willing to spend a little bit more for what we consider to be the best.

We're a multi-vendor shop. We do that on purpose to make sure that each vendor gives us their best. HPE was on the shortlist as well as some, what I consider to be up-and-comers, like Pure. They had a play but it wasn't a serious play. When it got down to the last two, HPE was the competition.

Do your homework. Get in the lab. Figure out what it does and doesn't do. Figure out what's different. Understand your I/O profiles. Understand your applications. Think about how you want to best choose your app mix, when it comes to what's possible. Often, when people go all-flash for the first time, especially in the mid-range, they might be a little surprised at what's possible. Rack one up, fully populate it with disk, and really see what you can get out of it before you make assumptions around what you need and how your applications are going to behave.

We have not used the built-in capabilities for migration yet. What we're looking forward to is understanding the opportunity to possibly use these as a migration weigh-station between some of our older VMAXs or any of our other mid-tier storage platforms; where we might be able to use some of those migration solutions to help us get from legacy faster. We haven't done any migration between the two yet. All we've done is refresh tune-up.

I rate the solution an eight out of 10 because, overall, for the market that it's serving, it is just a really great product. For us, the extensibility that we've gotten in terms of being able to run multiple application workloads and still get a nice densification factor - and not have to worry a lot about over-provisioning and tiering or about a lot of the other things we used to have to worry about, thanks to the all-flash and the way that it operates - has been really nice. The management overhead is minimal. It just works. It's a workhorse.

We primarily use it to support our customers. We are a managed service provider.

We have private and public clouds that we use it for. 

The performance over the years has been great. We like the platform and the upgrade features that it has. The biggest thing which we like is the support that we receive.

We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads. Therefore, we are getting great performance. Our customers have been very satisfied because they use a wide range of applications.

We use the data migration utilities a lot. 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. 

It allows us to focus on what we want to do. We want to work with our customers, helping them with their applications. We've had only a few times that we have to call into support for additional performance to make sure everything is working well. Each time, the support teams come back and show us areas that we need to strengthen on, and our customers have been very happy.

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

The auto-tiering feature is one of the key reasons that we do use the SC Series platform. It was cost effective and allowed us to have high-end 15K discs, then auto-tier those down to 7K discs, which gave us the best value for our money.

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

It is very stable. Upgrades have been pretty much flawless. Being able to swap out components and upgrade them later on has also been a huge benefit in keeping the platform cost effective.

It is very scalable. It's been able to function for all its assigned workloads.

Their support is probably the best I have ever worked with.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

I was able to utilize the Dell EMC support team and have everything installed and upgraded.

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.

We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value.

Look at the Compellent solution. It probably offers the most features: 

• Ease of use with their system.
• Being able to configure it.
• Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours. 
  

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The support team behind it.
• The stability of the system. 

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.

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

The solution is mainly used for primary storage and in more than half of the cases, we use the Live Volume, the Synchronous Replication - this Automatic Failover. Its function is for primary storage on two sites.

The customers really appreciate that the storage is cost-effective and that has enterprise features. The Synchronous Replication and the Live Volume, for example, are excellent. The storage is flexible. If you want to upgrade the storage with more capacity you can add one or two drives. It is very easy to upgrade in the future if you need to. 

The setup is straightforward.

The solution has very good stability.

The scalability is excellent.

We find the pricing to be quite fair.

Dell will discontinue this storage. That's the main pain point for clients right now. They will focus on Power Store and the SC Series will be at end-of-life soon - possibly as soon as one or two months from now.

In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency. The performance overall could be better.

I've been working with the solution for more than five years at this point. It's been a while.

The stability is okay, however, the performance could be better, as there have been a few issues surrounding latency. In most cases, the customer feedback is positive. It's only in extreme situations where there have been problems. 

The scalability is great. If a customer needs more storage, they can simply add more drives. It's very flexible and very easy to expand.

I've gotten positive feedback in terms of technical support. My understanding is that they have been very helpful and responsive and customers have been happy with the service they receive. 

There is no complexity in the setup. It's very straightforward. A company shouldn't have any issues with the setup process.

We are integrators and can help a customer with the installation of the product.

All the models and especially the entry model, the SC30/20, have a competitive price that is fair and offers very good value for money. It's reasonably and competitively priced. 

I'm an integrator. Our company is a company that is delivering solutions in IT for other customers. So, I'm not using some solution like this storage. I'm an architect, so I'm architecting these solutions for our customers. The solutions which we are using are mainly from Dell EMC.

I'd rate the solution at an eight 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.

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.

We use it for storage for a virtual environment.

It has definitely improved our speed, storage space, and recovery times.

The most valuable feature is the speed for the end-user.

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

I would also like to see all-in-one appliances. That's what I'm here, at VMworld 2018, to look at.

The stability is okay, and the maintenance response time is excellent.

The scalability is endless.

Technical support is perfect. We use it all the time. 

We were using Dell EMC servers and then went to the virtual environment.

The most important factor for me, when selecting a vendor, is reliability. I have been using Dell EMC since day one and I'm not willing to switch at this point.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

The value that we've seen is a reduction in costs: virtualization versus physical servers.

It's a very affordable solution.

We do not use the hybrid solution yet.

I would rate the solution we are currently using at eight out of 10. Moving to the next performance level would make it a 10. And for this particular solution, the only thing I would like to see improved is the price.