Dell SC Series Reviews

The SC includes various models, and we've deployed everything from their entry range to their mid-range storage. We mainly use SC for disaster recovery. 

Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features. 

The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage.

We've been using Dell SC Series for more than seven years.

SC is a fairly stable platform. I rate SC eight out of 10 for stability.

SC is fairly scalable. I give it a nine for scalability. You can scale up or scale out. You can increase the storage capacity or bring on additional storage boxes, which are viewed as one storage solution. It's a good solution for small or medium-sized businesses.

Dell support is superb. I rate Dell support nine out of 10. 

I used IBM earlier in my career, but I have primarily been a Dell reseller for the last 14 years. We also flirt with other technologies like Lenovo and NetApp, but we are primarily a Dell shop. The main difference between Dell and the other products is the simplicity, cost, and support services.

Deploy SC series storage is pretty straightforward. If you've worked with other storage technologies, it's easy to adapt to SC's requirements. I rate it eight out of 10 for ease of setup. You can deploy it in a day. We are currently using two people to deploy it: a lead and a support engineer.

The SC software comes with it, so it tends to be cheaper compared to other technologies. It's bundled with hardware, so it's a bit difficult to say what the license costs, but the price of the solution overall is reasonable. I rate the SC series nine out of 10 for affordability.

I rate the SC series eight out of 10. The product is at the end of its life, so I would recommend Dell Unity XT or PowerStore.

We use it for storage. The performance is great. So far there are no issues at all.

The benefits are the reliability and the performance. That is what we look for and it works great for us.

It's secure and fast. There's no downtime and the HA works great. Everything is easy and their support is great. 

Mostly, during an upgrade process, there is no downtime at all. The way they do is really great. Very easy, straightforward. There is a pre-check and then, when they finish it, they do a post-check. It's great the way they do the upgrade, no downtime at all.

Something that has been needed should be coming out with the 6.7 version of vSphere: You don't need a hot spare, so that should give you more IOPS. They've figured out how to do a RAID across all the drives, rather than using a hot spare. So the hot spare can be used too. You won't need a dedicated hot spare any longer.

Scalability is fine. It's much easier. I can add more drives and just keep on adding stuff if I want to. Of course, that affects your price point.

We've had great support from the Dell EMC team. I would rate their Copilot support the best that we have seen in the industry. I have used support with every vehicle we have, but their support is the best. Great engineers. Great engineering team. It's straightforward, easy, and you get the right people.

We were previously using Compellent. At the time we went with Compellent we looking for a solution which was affordable for us. We are a non-profit organization and it worked great from that point of view. They were new, they had this great solution. We looked at it and we said, "Okay, it is at our price point and it works great. Let's get it and done." Dell EMC acquired it but they continued the same support and it worked fine.

When selecting a vendor, what I look for is a good technical solution. As a technical guy, that's all I look for.

I engineered the solution, architected it with their support. We have also upgraded several times.

I think our ROI has been good. We used Compellent for seven years and it worked great. We didn't have any major downtime or major performance issue. We're already three years into the SC Series, so I hope I can use it for four more years. That would be a good ROI.

So far, the solution has been affordable for us. We have a 48-drive solution and that works great for our headquarters site. Their pricing goes by the number of physical drives that you have and the drives are not cheap. Whenever you want to upgrade something there is a price issue. For example, for a 4TB SSD, they may charge you seven grand or eight grand. It's expensive. So we try to get the maximum use out of what we have, for five to seven years, and then upgrade it.

We were looking at HPE, and we had looked at a product called OSNEXUS. They operate in the same town as us so we thought we could get support from them. We looked at five or six products.

We actually went with two solutions. In India, we are using OSNEXUS, which is located in the Seattle area. We use Dell EMC in our headquarters.

It depends on your budget. What are the criteria you're looking for? And it depends on how much storage you're going to use and the cost associated with that. There a lot of solutions now, software-defined solutions, which are way cheaper, but everything has a price. It depends upon your usage. If you are going for virtualization, sure, go ahead and use it.

Performance for a regular workload is pretty great, using 3000 IOPS and, during backup at night, it goes up to the 3000 IOPS as well.

Overall, the underlying technology they are using is really great. That's the whole thing. It's how they do the data programming, the read-cache and the write-cache. That's why everyone understands it very easily. "Oh, this is the underlying technology that you're using." And the new features they are coming up with, they're constantly trying to improve the system.

I rate it an eight out of ten. It's reliable and gives us performance. It's not a ten because no product is a ten. Technology is changing so fast. I'm sure they're adapting to it but nobody can say, "That is a ten out of ten," on a technical thing. It doesn't work that way.

This is our SAN product for use with a traditional VMware setup, using VMware clusters. We have the 150 terabyte enclosure.

This product should be a lot more user-friendly.

A central management system should be put in place to make it easier to configure.

I have been using this solution for two years.

The technical support is great. We have 24/7 support with a four-hour response. They are responsive and they stay to help until the problem is resolved.

One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device. Then, the new hardware was shipped to us the next day.

I also use HPE Nimble and I find that it is a lot easier to use and offers us more features.

I inherited this solution when I joined the company. In terms of setting it up, we add this SAN into a VMware cluster. The initial setup is unnecessarily complex, and much more so than a solution like HPE Nimble.

This product is too expensive compared to others, and I don't see any value in using it.

In summary, it's a nice product but it's too expensive and too complicated to set up.

If I were rating this product solely on the management or administrative side, I would rate it a one out of ten because it's just ridiculous. Performance-wise, I can rate it a four or five out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

We are a solution provider and the Dell EMC SC Series is one of the products that we implement for our customers. Our clients often use this product in a virtualized server environment for mid-range database use.

Once it's put in place, it becomes a vital tool.

Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good.

The management is pretty good.

It has good expandability options.

The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do.

I have about five years' experience with this product.

I have not heard any feedback about bugs or glitches in the system. Once it's in place, it's solid.

It's fairly scalable, as long as you size it properly, to begin with. The expansion options are pretty good. Our clients for this product range in size from small to large businesses.

Technical support for this product is excellent and I would rate them a ten out of ten.

When you have questions, you get them answered

We have deployed HPE storage in some cases where it was what the customer already had installed. Some of these customers switched to Dell because their technical staff was more familiar with it.

My understanding from our engineers is that the initial setup is on the complex side. There are things that are not intuitive that make it a little more complex.

This is a solution with good performance that I recommend, and for anybody who is considering it, I would tell them to give it a shot.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it for VDI, mainly. In terms of performance, there were some difficulties to begin with, with a lot of different upgrades. It took a lot of time because we've got several of them. With all the upgrades done, it has run pretty smoothly.

Right now, we've just got one particular system on it, where we're just trying to test the waters to figure out if it's good because we use a combination of Dell EMC and Cisco equipment. So far, the Dell EMC seems to be doing pretty well. There are some applications that we've run where it appears that the Dell EMC would be a better solution.

We like the integration, the nodes themselves, the way that everything is integrated together. It seems like it's less hardware to keep up with.

Speed and performance seem to be good on the hardware side.

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 calls 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.

As I said, when we first deployed it, there were a lot of upgrades that had to be done. We would have trouble with this or that, networking would fall, stalls, delays. We would have to run through another upgrade. We've got about 50 or 60 of these pieces of equipment, and to do an upgrade would take 30 to 40 hours.

We've had to coordinate that back and forth, as this is a live system. Since we got through that process - and it took weeks - it seems to have been a lot more stable. It's almost to the point now that we can say that we're pleased with it. To begin with, we were ready to throw it out the window.

We like the scalability. It seems like we can increase it and add to it when the need comes, to meet our growth.

In my position, I don't use the technical support. We do have other employees who, I'm sure, have used it. There are several times that we've called them. So far, we have not had complaints about the tech support. They've been able to resolve the issues that we've had.

We have found it to be affordable. Comparing the cost with other hardware, it seems to be right in line with the compute and the storage that we get with it. The cost is a saw-off compared to other options because there's not a lot of difference between them. You just have to figure out what would be the best.

I would consider Dell EMC to be one of the top options, by all means. I've liked HPE, but it seems that they are integrating with that, as far as VMware is concerned. The two that we're currently using are Cisco and Dell. They're the main two that we're bouncing back and forth with.

At times the SC Series has been slow. Most of the time, we have found the problem is on the appliance side, not the hardware side.

I rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get it to a ten it would need fewer upgrades and getting things right to begin with. That's really one of the core issues that we've had with it: so many upgrades. Once every two to three weeks we've had to upgrade firmware or something else. Although now, that has slowed down.

It is a global storage solution for all our servers.

What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability. It did serve us well. Overall it was a good product for us.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say the lack of reporting would be the main issue.

I have been using Dell EMC SC Series for at least 10 - 12 years.

We keep it up to date, so it is the latest version. The hardware is not the latest, but the firmware and the controllers are the latest.

We use Compellent and we're looking at other products at this point. The Compellent is going to be phased out in a year or so or maybe two years. I don't know, but it has to be replaced sooner than later which is why I was looking for another product.

Component support was great. On a scale of one to ten they were a ten, they were always helpful.

It does the work for us. If you're on SSD, it is going to do the the work. Obviously working with tiering at tier 1, 2, 3 was a pain when we got it, because the data is always moving around but since we're using only one tier SSD, there's no management to do with it and we are just checking to see if everything is working well on that. Otherwise, outside of the reporting, I would not complain about that system. If we could extend the support another five years we would have done so because the support is perfect. When you call them, there is always someone.

Because this product is going to be phased out I wouldn't recommend anyone to start with it. But I'm looking at the PowerStore to see if it is a fit for us. I would assume that PowerStore is going to be the next step after the Compellent.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Dell EMC SC Series an eight.

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.

It back-ends our vSphere virtualization farms.

Overall, it has really helped us to virtualize a lot of workloads where server or application owners were very hesitant to move away from their physical boxes because they were used to having local disks and the performance that came with that. With the SC Series SAN, the performance that we've gotten out of the boxes alleviated anyone's concerns. We do not get complaints about the performance of our virtual infrastructure.

Also, 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.

• Reliable
• Good performance
• Economical
  

We also utilize replication. And the data progression feature gives us the ability to economically utilize those solid state discs by having a three-tier solution. That was key for the product.

We make use of VMware's VMotion features quite a bit. You don't even know that the SAN is there. It just moves the workload. It does it quickly. We've been happy.

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.

We haven't had any issues affecting the stability.

It was easy to expand. In year two of our owning the SC8000 SANs, we expanded the flash tiers and it was a piece of cake. Very easy.

I have called the SC Series support and they've been great.

I worked with a VAR on the initial setup of the product. It was very straightforward, very easy to bring it online.

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.

We looked at several vendors. I work in public education so we have to consider alternate sources for every major purchase. Dell EMC gave us the most bang for the buck and we are comfortable working with them as a company.

When we look to work with a vendor, the important criteria are follow-through, ease of communicating with the vendor, and the quality of technical support.

You have to do your preparation and research but that's no different than buying any SAN. Get to know your local Dell EMC pre-sales engineer quite a bit because they'll be able to help you properly size the unit.

In our mixed workloads, we generally see sub-10ms latency on the product. I don't really have any stats for high-end IOPS because we are not really doing high-performance computing. We have mixed workloads and I'm more concerned with latency than IOPS. But the performance has been great. We have been very happy with it.