Dell ECS and Pure Storage FlashBlade are competing products in the data storage solutions market. Despite Dell ECS being cost-effective with robust support, Pure Storage FlashBlade is often viewed as superior due to its advanced features and performance.
Features: Dell ECS offers scalable object storage, strong data security, and excellent data compression capabilities. Pure Storage FlashBlade provides high-performance all-flash storage, seamless data processing, and efficient data replication, ideal for fast data retrieval and high throughput scenarios.
Room for Improvement: Dell ECS could enhance its integration capabilities beyond its current offerings, broaden compatibility with more platforms, and improve the intuitiveness of its user interface. Pure Storage FlashBlade might benefit from reducing its cost to become more accessible, expanding its support for diverse workloads, and improving the simplicity of its administrative tools.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell ECS is praised for straightforward deployment and comprehensive support, making it widely appreciated for its user-friendly interface. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also easy to deploy, benefiting from specialized customer support that is proactive and responsive, particularly in complex environments.
Pricing and ROI: Dell ECS offers competitive pricing with a solid ROI due to lower setup costs and effective functionality. Pure Storage FlashBlade justifies its higher price with superior performance and features, providing exceptional ROI for environments where performance and rapid data processing are critical.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
There is a lack of SUSE Linux experts which affects the level of support.
Dell provides high-quality technical support
My thoughts on the technical support or customer service from Dell are generally positive
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
It allows scale-out processes by adding extra nodes, providing flexibility for customers to increase capacity on demand.
Through the fabrics, it provides the clustering, allowing us to add nodes easily.
I would rate scalability between eight or nine, as it provides a good ability to scale and expand storage.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
We have not experienced any outages in the last four years.
I'd rate stability maybe 9.5 out of ten.
Dell ECS provides high stability compared to other object solutions.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Live logs should be viewable through the GUI like with Logstash or Elasticsearch.
Additionally, sometimes there is an issue with memory where it hangs, and they can improve garbage collection, which takes up a lot of space during cleanup.
Incorporating extra integrations beyond S3, like Hadoop file systems, and being well aligned with trends like AI solutions would be beneficial.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
It relies on nearline SAS drives, which are cheaper than flash or SSDs.
The pricing model is on the higher side compared to other vendors.
The price is reasonable given the abundance of features, including managing, control, host resources, dockers, and containers.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
The stability of this solution is a major advantage, as we've not experienced any outages in the last four years.
Dell ECS helps with managing storage requirements since it's S3 kind of object storage with all needed enterprise features such as immutability, snapshotting, and application management, which are nice sets of features usually required.
If we encounter any issues or need to upgrade anything, we can simply open a ticket, and the EMC team is there to assist us.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
Enterprise-ready. Future-proof. Data-first.
Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) is a file and object storage solution from Dell EMC. ECS has been created to support both traditional and next-generation ecosystems equally. ECS boasts unrivaled economics, manageability, resilience, and scalability to satisfy the demands of today's next-gen, robust business enterprise ecosystems. ECS can easily be deployed in a software-defined model or as a turn-key appliance. ECS is software-defined and multi-layered for unlimited scalability. Every layer is abstracted and scalable with no single point of failure.
Everything is done within the software, which is containerized, using docker.
ECS is currently deployed using basic commodity hardware, which can easily be federated across as many as eight different locations and managed as a single resource. Additionally, ECS can also protect data at the site level, locally, disk, node, and rack levels. The federation enables a single global namespace with everywhere access to content. Applications can quickly rewrite in an active/active or everywhere active manner.
ECS is also able to be used as secondary storage or archival storage. This will free up valuable primary storage of data that is stale, redundant, or used infrequently, and the data will remain easily accessible. ECS uses policy-based tiering such as Data Domain, Cloud tiering, Isilon using cloud polls, and Geodrive, which give Windows systems direct access to ECS. Windows users can still use server message block (SMB) while leveraging the more expansive ECS storage.
ECS is enterprise-grade and offers valuable features such as retention, multi-tenancy, metering, monitoring, quotas, and more. ECS builds in robust security from the ground up and encrypts data. ECS is compliant with STIG guidelines and adheres to SEC rule 17A-4F.
ECS is an enterprise-ready solution that allows organizations to easily simplify object storage management and visualize information in intuitive new ways, and empowers your business to do even more with data. With ECS, enterprise organizations can deliver cloud-scale economics in-house that will lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and scale, creating greater levels of productivity and profitability.
Reviews from Real Users
One user, who is a deputy director at a tech service company, says ECS offers “good performance, reliability, and technical support”.
Dell EMC ECS is “a stable solution which is easy to scale, install and manage”, relates another user, who is a senior buyer at a tech service company.
"What I like best about this product is that it is a complete solution, both hardware, and software, by the same vendor," summarizes a system engineer at a tech services company.
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
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