Dell SC Series Reviews

It acts as our VM storage, and the performance is good.

It could be hyperconvergent in the future.

Stability is good so far.

The scalability is very good because we can add up to, if I'm not mistaken, another three stacks, three cases. There is room for us to keep upgrading the capacity.

The Phone Home support is very good. It provides proactive troubleshooting and responds to end-customers like us.

We also have a local vendor to support us and all our IT infrastructure. They are acting as our consultant.

Initially, when we chose this product it was because of the cost component and because the service was very good.

For me, when selecting a vendor the most important issue is support, after-sale services.

The initial setup was straightforward. Everything was done by the engineers on site. Very little was required of IT during the setup. So it was pretty easy for us.

We did do some comparisons between HPE 3PAR as well as Dell Compellent, but we choose Dell, as I mentioned, because of the cost factor.

The first thing you need to know is what you need, what your requirements are. The second thing is how much of a budget there is.

I rate Dell Compellent an eight out of 10. So far, we haven't faced any problems. Even during the upgrades, there have been no issues. In addition, support is very good.

We're starting our ScaleIO implementation. We have vSAN but we also have software-defined. Our primary goal is to reduce our infrastructure costs by having another offering out there, outside of the traditional SAN storage environment.

It's definitely scalable, definitely fits the majority of our use cases, in high-performance environments such as Oracle, SQL, and so forth.

In particular, for us, we have two primary data centers. The hospital is located in New York but we have two data centers in New Jersey. So geo clustering is a big thing for us, for our active-active environment.

It's still an early phase for us, but as of right now it's stable.

We've been looking at it for some time, and we decided to go for it for our projects for this year.

In terms of the initial setup, we did two. We did the software-only and we also did the hardware. Software-only was pretty straightforward. With hardware, the challenge we had was that we're pretty siloed in our environment so we had to get networking involved. It was the complexity of the network which was difficult, to make sure we had the performance in the environment.

Start slowly. Generally, initially, you'll get pushback because people are used to traditional storage. Start with what we call low-hanging fruit. For example, we put our test environment on it. Once people become comfortable with it, see that it performs well, then they'll start looking for it for the higher-tier environments.

We're using VMware and it's particularly easy, you just provision the storage. But when it's a physical environment and you're trying to go to that environment you have to have a migration, usually a whole space migration. We try to get away from that because it's time-consuming, after hours, and so forth.

I would rate the SC Series at seven out of ten right now. That might change as future releases come out and more functionality comes into the product.

The useability is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

I've found the stability to be very good. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have found the solution's technical support to be helpful.

The model of the device is quite old. They need to update it a bit. 

From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old. Although I know that the storage that we are using is a bit old as well. Beyond that, I don't see any other features that I'm exactly missing.

I've been using the solution for about two years or so, give or take. It hasn't been that long. 

The solution is quite stable and the performance is good even though it is getting old. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. We find it reliable. 

The solution can scale well.

We have about ten people using the solution in our organization. 

Technical support has been quite good. We are very satisfied with the level of support we receive. 

We've worked with a few similar solutions, including HPE Nimble Storage. If you compared it to this solution, I'd say that both have good value and both have their place in environments that are a bit different. I wouldn't compare them directly.

I haven't been involved in the usage or installation of the device.

The solution is coming to the end of life. They don't really sell them as new products.

I'm a user, consultant, and reseller. 

I can't remember the exact version number of the solution, however, the model of the series is 5020.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode), Fast Track.

Additional features like Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode) and Fast Track makes this storage unique. Moreover, you can integrate your existing infrastructure--no matter whether it's FC or FCoE or iSCSI--with this unified storage solution. This means you don't need to buy a new storage solution for future escalation.

Improvement is a continuous process for every technology. Similarly, Compellent is improving its software (Storage Center) and releases updated version often.

One and a half years.

Not yet. But matching color coding during zoning is sometimes a little bit annoying.

No.

Not yet.

I don't have any complaints.

Excellent. I think EMC support service is equivalent of Copilot service of Compellent. And their response time is really good.

Switched from EqualLogic because of Unified scale out architecture. You can use this storage file and block level both. Further, if you consider with others OEM like EMC for unified solution you have to consider VNX 5200/5300 above. Whereas there is no model dependency on Compllent.

No issues. The installation and configuration is very simple.

Yes. I did the implementation. There is no doubt about Dell's expertise level. They have really an efficient and expert group of people.

Technically I can say that day to day cost is at a considerable level. Previously I told you if you consider 5-8 years solution then it'll minimize your day to day cost. Because, later to scale up your capacity you just need to add DAE (Disk Array Enclosure). That's all. And DAE is cheaper than buying a new storage for scale up capacity.

None.

Definitely I would like to say to all others, if you want good unified storage solution with satisfactory level ROI just go with Compellent. It'll give you flexibility, good ROI and you can integrate your existing infrastructure without facing complexity, no matter what kind of infrastructure you have (FC, iSCSI or FCoE).

There is no need to archive data and/or move data from expensive storage since the device does that itself depending on the use of the data. This is the data that you moved to the slower disks.

1. Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size.
2. Performance management: The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources.

Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage.

No issues.

It is more difficult than others, since once you need to growth, you need to make sure what tier you will increase to in order to redistribute the data. It can take more time and planning, but is worth the effort.

Excellent, Copilot (support for Compellent) is excellent.

Yes, we used to have EMC and Hitachi Storage. The growth of storage was limited and price/performance were not good.

Initially, it can be difficult since you need to understand the tiering philosophy. It is very different to normal SAN deployments, but once you understand them, they are very straightforward.

Take your time to meet with your representative and tell them your needs and listen careful to every recommendation. Always keep in mind, this is not just a enclosure with disks is a complete SAN as a service. There is software, license, and storage in one single solution.

Yes, IBM's and HP's tiering solutions, but there are too expensive and bulky.

Document your needs, current storage, expansion, and timeframe for replays (snapshots). If you have backups or replications in place, make sure they work with Compellent Tiered Storage.

We are heavily virtualized and it is used for the storage. It's performing well, we have had no issues to date.

It has improved our organization because before, we had the storage in silos. This solution allowed us to consolidate into a single Compellent system. That helped us to maximize our management greatly. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to replicate. We are running a financial company and it needs to be available 24/7. We can't afford any downtime.

The response time is also great.

We've had failures with disks, but no downtime. We were able to change them before they caused a problem.

It is a stable solution. We haven't had any downtime.

It can scale. We actually added a different chassis to it during the time we were using it.

Technical support was responsive, we got to the right person. We have never had a problem with them.

We were using EqualLogic before we went to the SC Series. We switched because we had them in silos so we needed to consolidate.

When we select a vendor, our most important criteria is that we should be able to depend on their product. Absolutely no failures. Uptime is most important.

I wouldn't say the setup was straightforward. It was complex, but it was manageable at the same time.

The solution is affordable. We bought an entry-level solution and, for the price and the amount of storage that we got, we consider it a deal.

We are a Dell EMC shop, so we always go with Dell EMC and Vmware as we have never been in a situation where we were unable to find a Dell product that suited our requirements perfectly. 

If you don't have a SAN infrastructure, this is a great one, a great entry-level SAN to start with.

We are actually moving on to a vSAN. Within the next two months, we won't be using the SC Series anymore and will be migrating away from it to a vSAN. There were no problems with the SC Series, we just wanted to implement a hyperconverged system.

The SC Series performed the functions we needed it to perform.

It is performing well.

We have a bit more storage, and it is faster.

• Ease of use
• Reliability
• It is fast and performs well.

The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow.

So far, so good. However, we have only had it running for four months.

Scalability is good. We still have more room.

We have not used technical support yet.

Our previous solution ran out of space and IOPS. Therefore, we had to get something which was faster.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, though I was not involved. A co-worker did it.

Only Dell EMC products were on our shortlist.

We did look at Nutanix, but they did not fit into the way that we are organized. We also looked at NetApps, but quickly dismissed them.

I would recommend to buy Dell EMC 3020 to anyone researching these type of solutions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Support: We knew the support from EMC was really good.

We use it as the OS drives for our VMs. Our is a hybrid solution.

It's good storage product for our C and D drives for the virtualization space.

It has good dedupe and compression. Also, the built-in data migration capabilities are pretty good, as is the federation. When we started migrating the workloads from different storage platforms, like NetApp and XtremeIO, it helped us in moving in that direction.

It would be great if they could increase the compression and dedupe ratio.

We haven't had any issues with stability so far.

It's scalable.

Technical support is good.

We had XtremeIO for the past three or four years and, prior to that, we had NetApp. I think the SC Series works better. We are pretty happy with it. In terms of performance with mixed workloads, the SC Series is pretty good. We don't see a lot of latency as we saw with NetApp. But I would say XtremeIO and SC are similar in that regard.

Most storage platforms are the same, but when it comes to the performance and dedupe, as I said, those were the main criteria, what we were after when we talked to Dell EMC. The relationship and trust are also very important.

The setup was straightforward. We used Dell EMC Professional Services, and they came in. A company like ours is pretty big, so we use the vendors to come in and install things because we don't want to mess them up. They gave us the development documents, etc., so we're really happy.

The ROI is good.

It is affordable. We need more discount, but it's good. Pricing is more important than improving on dedupe or compression.

We looked at Nimble and NetApp. We went with Dell EMC. We have a good relationship since most of our stuff is on VMware. When Michael Dell bought VMware we said, "Yeah, we should increase our usage," and, of course, we have been using EMC for more than a decade.

Research is important. Understand the product. Just like any other technology you use, research is the most important part.