What advice do you have for others considering Dell SC Series?

I am a big fan of the user interface of Dell SC Series because it provides extensive information about usage, aiding in data recovery and handling. The product is superior, and I wish it wasn't being eliminated. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

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.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution nine out of ten and recommend it to bigger organizations. Performance

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.

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.

I would recommend this solution for customers looking for Unity or PowerStore functionality. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I rate the SC Series a 10 out of 10 because it was a lifesaver. One of the use cases that we had, where we found it really gave us an edge, was back in 2015. There was a compliance requirement where we had to roll out a lot of old logs and data. We had it sitting on the old 2TB SATA drive, the slowest drive possible. We always worried about how we were going to get the data since we were using all-flash and archiving on the slowest 2TB drives, but when the stacking came, it really gave us all the data without any purchase—the tiering feature really shone at that time. So, that is one of the reasons why we trust and love this product. If the SC Series was still in use, I would honestly recommend it to others, at any given time. When we moved out from business critical workloads, away from SC Series, we did a lot of crazy testing. It gave us the capability to get a lot of performance out and it was very flexible. If it was still there, we would still be buying more of it.

I rate Dell EMC SC Series a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

My advice would be to look at the succeeding product, the replacement product that replaces it. On a scale from one to ten, I would give Dell EMC SC Series a rating of nine. Just looking back at it over time, the initial setup was a little more difficult back in the 2008, 2009 timeframe. If that wasn't so difficult back then, I would give them a ten. As I said, that did get better. They got much better over time, but that's why I said nine out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. It's better to have it certified first then hand in the petition.

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.

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

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.

I would definitely recommended this solution to others. However, if they are looking at the unifier, there are other alternatives. I would like to see it becoming more unified in the next release. I will give it an eight out of ten, because I think there is room for improvement. Nothing's perfect.

We are partners with Dell EMC. I would recommend this solution. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We use the on-premises deployment model. I would recommend it to others. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

My advice to others would be to get the demo to test the solution out. On a scale of one to ten, my rating is a ten. Simplicity and stability are very important for me, and this solution is very simple to use, it's very efficient and a customer won't make many mistakes when using it. In the future, I would like to see better monitoring so that we can give to the customer an indication of their capacity to upgrade. These kinds of tools must be very user-friendly - especially for those customers that didn't study storage functionality in detail.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, if there is an outage and we do not get proper support from their technical team when we call them, in such a scenario we are looking at their competitors sooner.

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.

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.

I rate it a nine out of ten. Nothing gets a ten.

Do your research if you are looking into this product. I am very happy with it.

The SC Series is not the thing for your mom and pop shop. It is an enterprise-grade, mid-tier business type solution. It depends on how much space you need. Some situations can be fine with the EqualLogic series, although that's going to go away and, perhaps, the lower-end Unity's will replace them. You have to look at all those factors. In terms of performance with mixed workloads, generally, the Compellent has been very good. If it's over the 20ms mark that's not good, but I have never seen any problems with that, in particular, when we've added flash. In terms of migrations, I haven't used the built-in capabilities. I'll use VMware's VMotion to move things from one SAN to the other. A couple of years ago I had a Compellent upgrade where, at that time, they didn't support the upgrade I mentioned earlier, where you do one controller at a time on that thicker model, so I had to set them up side by side. They had some physical servers and I just used replication to replicate the LUNS over to the new SAN. I then shut down the physical servers for a few minutes and pointed everything to the new SAN and that worked great. I know they do have the data import, it's just something that we don't generally use because most of our customers are fully virtualized. We sell the equipment and install it. I do both sides of the field, the engineering, both pre-sales and post-sales. We still have a lot of customers that are in the 6 series. A lot of our customers have moved up to 7.1. If you have the SSD drives, then you can do things like dedupe, which you can't do on the older versions, and you can't do if you don't have the SSD drives. Evidently, the deduplication uses some part of the SSD drives for metadata or something like that, so that's a must. There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and having it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is not only going to add space but performance to the array. I've got a couple of customers that want to use that very soon. I like the SC Series. I enjoy working with it. We've done a lot of sales lately, which is kind of surprising with all the new, fancy, all-flash arrays out there. Customers really don't need all-flash today, and that's really where SC fills in, with its auto-tiering, hybrid - mixed SSDs and spinning disks - customers just don't need all-flash systems. They don't have that kind of workload.

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.

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.

Dell has a foot in the door. We buy their servers and have relationships with their account manager and reps. I'm content. Dell EMC has been through some changes over the past couple of years. When Dell merged with EMC, it was a bit rough, but they have great experts. That kept us in this realm because of their support and team. It is a great, mid-level introduction to storage. I would recommend it. We are happy with it.

I rate the solution at seven out of ten. To be a ten it would need better support and better compatibility metrics across the firmware driver stack.

Do your research, check out all the vendors, and get your hands on it as much as possible.

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.

You should definitely have a partner come in. If you're going to do a multi-tier environment, look at your IOPS: What are your hot IOPS, what's your total storage need? You need to plan out those different tiers because that's where it saves you money. You don't have to go all-flash if you don't need it. You only need to be able to deliver your performance and most places have tons of cold data that they aren't aware of. So, having someone come in and do an assessment of your current storage environment and see what performance you really do need - what you're getting now and what your projected growth will be - is important, so that a system can be properly sized. That should be a pre-sales process. Your engineer should understand Compellent and be able to size it properly. I just deployed a 3000 Series in a small VDI environment and, during a bunch of huge data copies, I was seeing 15,000 IOPS at less than about 7 or 8 milliseconds of latency and that was on 10K disk. I was really impressed with that. The most important factor when looking at a vendor is, are they there to sell you a box or are they there to help you? Are they there for the long term? From my dealings with it, it's right up there at ten out of ten. Obviously, there are more expensive systems out there but, for all the deployments that I've seen or done, its been a rock solid platform.

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.