Dell SC Series Reviews

We use the product in our company and I deal with it personally.

The solution is automated, but we still don't get a complete speech from the disc. The flash speed should be addressed. 

While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations. Our racks are at their limit, so we do not have the requisite scalability to expand. 

We would like to see replication of the data storage without the need to resort to third party tools. Storage to storage repetition would be a nice feature. 

We have been using Dell EMC SC Series for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations. Our racks are at their limit, so we do not have the requisite scalability to expand.

When it comes to upgrading, we are contemplating a move to TISON, TI-1, TI-2 and TI-3. There may be a need to move between the TISON. 

As this is our first product, I cannot give a comprehensive review or rating.

I rate Dell EMC SC Series as an eight out of ten. 

We use this product for daily business and normal IT operations. We also use it for replication of one system to another system. We also use it for the hostings for HANA virtualization. Those kinds of replications and IT applications. We use a hybrid version.

It had a lot of integration and supported all the platforms, so I was happy with what they were offering. The biggest selling point was when the vendor upgraded it. Dell upgraded the software licenses sold with that. Whenever the hardware is end-of-life, we could upgrade the controller or add a new disk or whatever. There was no lifecycle of three years or five years. We could carry on just by upgrading. It had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things.

Dell could improve the upgrading process. It was the lifecycle that made it very short. You'd upgrade the disk, and in eight, nine months, it would be obsolete. They cancelled an enhancement that included an all-flash unit. This would have improved the product.

We had worked with this product from Compellent's days before Dell bought them over, so I'll presume from 2006.

We never had a single crash with this product. It was just fine. 

The support was excellent. We had this storage for a while and server monitoring from Compellent.

Any IT company can do it. It's straightforward.

Pricing is market-related and is flexible for the solution. Pricing depends on varying life cycles.

We're trying to move some people across to some other storage solutions because this product is at end-of-life. I would give this product 10 out of 10.

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.

We use it for various type of data but mainly for virtual environments.

With the hybrid storage approach, we can balance between cheap space and good performance.

The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works quite well. We use a lot the snapshots functionality.

We appreciate the solution offers deduplication and compression as well.

I would prefer to have NVME, at least on the back-end and inline deduplication. Anyhow as Dell EMC has announced the new product - Power Store these features will not be available for Compellent.

I've been using the solution for six years.

The solution is very stable.

We have about 60 ongoing operations. As you can imagine, we have had some challenges in the past, but not something that it's more concerning than what might happen when compared to the other storage vendors.

We didn't have a need to replace the controllers. These can be added, however, we didn't replace the controllers in any of the cages. As I understand it, that is something you can do. 

The only issue with scaling up is that the pricing gets pretty high. It's not easy to get a discount for a vendor if you want to extend the box. It might be about 1000 Euros for a few terabytes and goes up pretty quickly from there.

The support works very well. We deal with support from different parts of the world including Europe, Asia, and America. There are local support centers in each region. It's easy to engage the support and usually they are very proactive. I have very good feedback for support. We have had some challenges sometimes in a very few amount of cases where the parts were not delivered on time.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's simple and lower models are customer installable. 

We do the physical installation for our clients. We handle the initialization of the site. We get access and do the initial configuration where we configure the storage pool, the profile, and whatever is needed there. Then we do a series of tests. Functional tests, such as failover tests, are something we do for our clients during the implementation process.

The solution is not expensive. Initialization is strait forward, not complicated

They have a few features that can be licensed.

THe solution works well for small to medium-sized environment. The storage isn't enterprise-level. 

I'd rate the solution 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.

Our primary use case is for the traditional environment like virtualization and the database exchange.

Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable. 

The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view. 

In the next release, I would for them to improve their application feature. 

I would also like to see some cloud integration.

I have been using Compellent for around two years. 

We have zero downtime. There is no disruption at all. It's highly stable with all the types of abundant solutions. All the hardware parts are in abundance.

It's easy to expand without affecting the current production but there definitely is a limit with each model but that's to be expected.

Support wise, it's very stable. The support is 100% good. Support is the key for Dell EMC.

The setup was straightforward. I implement it for my customers. It can be deployed within an hour. 

You only need one person for the deployment. One person is more than enough. There's no dedicated team required.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

It's better to have it certified first then hand in the petition. 

I mostly like the interface of the product.

Compellent is a nice technology, but it's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there.

I have been using Compellent for five years.

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

Compellent is not scalable.

We have a medium size company using the product.

The support is good.

Compellent's setup is straightforward.

I would not recommend the product. There are other, better products out there.

This system is not a good fit for most customers. It's not only the fact that it's too old, but it has not developed any more since Dell bought it.

On a scale from one to 10, one is the worst, 10 is the best I'd give it a 6.

Dell Compellent storage just provides for our storage needs.

It has given us a reliable and dynamic storage system that we did not match before with our previous solution.

The feature I have found the most valuable is that the interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly.

I think it would be nice if the connection were better integrated with the network so I could get a broader view of both the network and the system. This would be good in order for us to be able to troubleshoot anything that is going wrong.

The product has improved so much over the years that it is hard to think of something else that it really needs to be improved now in comparison to where it was. It is actually kind of good the way it is. Nothing is really annoying me right now. It is really just working and you hardly have to know it is there.

The product is both stable and scalable.

It is a scalable product. We don't have any problem with that. Right now we have about 600 end-users on the system.

I'm very satisfied with the company's technical support. It's very nice. We were using Dell's Copilot Support and it was really very good.

Five years ago we used to have some off-brand thing. It was not a very good solution. It was just a collection of hard drives. When we got to a point we realized it wasn't able to do the job we had to choose another solution. That was when we did a little research and switched to a virtual environment and went with Compellent.

I think that overall the setup was pretty complex. It is not something you just set up in a heartbeat. You need to do some configuration so it takes a little bit longer than just push a button to install.

I think that overall that the product is very good for us and what we need it to do. 

The advice I would give to other people considering Compellent depends on what they want to do and what they want to use it for. I'm going with a hybrid converged infrastructure now. If you looking for traditional storage then I would definitely recommend it.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best. I would rate Compellent overall as a seven.