Dell SC Series Reviews

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The solution's most valuable features are its storage capabilities and its duplication.

The solution could use more integration with popular backup systems. Dell storage solutions are not very integrated. There are no dedicated models for, for example, Veeam backup or Redhouse backup, etc.

The lower model, the 3000, should have duplication. It doesn't right now. It's only from 5000 that this is offered, but it depends on the performance. It could be they don't offer it on lower models because the duplication is too much of a burden to the performance.

The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all.

Scalability is okay, but the pricing of additional discs is pretty high. It's more optimized for the whole model of discs, not for single disc upgrades. We have about 500 users on the solution currently.

Technical support is good. They have good information and good remote monitoring of the systems. There are good accessibility and knowledgable engineers, so overall, we have a very good impression of the support of this solution. The take a reasonable amount of time to answer our queries.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We added this to replace some older methods because it's flexible and the visual storage was generally a very good idea.

The initial setup was rather straightforward. Deployment took about a month for the  5000, and the SC 3000 took about a week.

In terms of assistance with implementation, for the 5000 we used the Dell pilot program and for the SC 3000 we used a reseller.

We purchased the whole package at once. We don't pay any additional fees annually.

We are using the private cloud deployment model and utilize both the 3000 and 5000 models of the solution.

My advice to others considering using the solution would be, first of all, to buy the full disc on the shelf, not part of the shelf. Buy all the discs, and then buy another shelf because it's most effective financially. Buying a single disc is extremely ineffective and extremely expensive.

I would also advise others to look for backup software that is compatible. If you use something and it's not supported, you may be disappointed. We don't use it and don't plan to use it, so this is not a problem for us. There are probably others, however, that may look for an optimization method for their backups.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten; it would be higher if the solution had better integration capabilities.

What we are using from Dell EMC is their server line and their storage line. We're pretty well embedded with Dell EMC.

We no longer have an issue, especially in the support arena, of wasted hours: getting support, waiting for support to arrive onsite. It's been a huge time saver for us.

The most valuable feature is the customer support. Everyone has a product that goes wrong. It's how well they handle it when it does, and Dell EMC has been tremendous at that.

In terms of managing the solution, they've gone from "not bad to manage" to "downright easy."

We have integrated the system with Exchange and vSphere, among others.

They need to make it a little cheaper.

I won't entertain any other vendor at this point.

In terms of scalability, so far, so good. We run a whole lot of different product lines. The ability to scale, at least within the product series, has been wonderful.

Technical support has been top-notch.

The only thing that made the setup difficult were the layers of project management. I know they're going through some changes as Dell and EMC merge, but they really need to take a strong look at how project managers are deployed and what their level of knowledge is. More often than not, I'm having to run those calls.

We've been able to take them and run them completely to end-of-life. For us, storage side, that's about five years. We consider that the best turnover rate for us, while for server hardware it's three years. With support contracts, they've all made it to the end of those time frames.

Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, when it comes to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines. That would be my one complaint.

I always recommend them.

Regarding the purchasing process, we were working with a VAR and they helped loop us together with the sales engineers and usually, within a few hours of discussion, we were able to drill down on everything. We had a product solution figured out, and almost next-day.

The most important criteria when selecting a product like this are the reliability of the equipment itself and the support.

I rate the solution at nine out of ten. They've really got the customer service, especially in the support arenas, nailed. They make information-gathering on their solutions, especially during pre-sale, easy to do.

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.