Dell SC Series vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform comparison

Dell Technologies and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Frame-Based Disk Arrays category. Dell Technologies is ranked #3 with an average rating of 9.0, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2. Additionally, 94% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Both Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and Dell SC Series offer robust storage solutions, with each having unique advantages. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is favored for pricing and support, while Dell SC Series stands out due to its advanced features, making it considered worth the higher price.

Features: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform is praised for its reliable performance, scalability, and advanced data protection features. Dell SC Series is noted for its automated tiering, easy management, and integration with VMware. Users highlight Hitachi's robust data protection, while Dell's automated tiering stands out, making it easier to optimize storage resources.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest that Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform could improve its integration capabilities and reduce costs. For Dell SC Series, users seek enhancements in reporting tools and better performance metrics. Hitachi needs better integration, while Dell could benefit from more refined reporting options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform generally receives positive feedback for smooth deployment and responsive customer service. Dell SC Series, while praised for a straightforward deployment process, sometimes faces criticism for slower customer service responses. Hitachi excels in customer support, whereas Dell's deployment ease is appreciated.

Pricing and ROI: Users find Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform to have a higher setup cost but indicate that the ROI is solid due to reliability and scalability. Dell SC Series is considered more cost-effective for initial setup, and users feel the long-term ROI justifies its advanced features. Hitachi might be pricier upfront, but its ROI is seen as strong; Dell is more budget-friendly on setup, with good ROI seen in feature utility.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Steven McClendon

Data Center Server & Storage Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Superior platform with excellent snapshots and cost-saving auto-tiering

I'm a big fan of the SC Series platform. Its feature set is superior to some of the other platforms. The snapshots on SC are excellent, allowing for multiple snapshot schedules for any one system. The auto-tiering functionality intelligently moves new data to the highest performance tier and then progresses it down to less expensive tiers over time, providing cost savings for customers.

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Ozair Amin

Sales Manager - Infrastructure at Synergy Computers

A robust and dependable product that ensures a 100 percent data availability guarantee

We don't encounter any challenges in selling these Hitachi VSPs to our customers. These products boast an exceptionally robust architecture, making them highly reliable. This reliability is the key reason behind our lack of challenges. However, when we delve into the realm of competition, particularly in the unified storage sector, we do face certain challenges. This is primarily due to the usage of gateways in their storage solutions by some competitors. Unlike other competitors such as NetApp and Huawei, who do not employ gateways, we contend with challenges related to these gateways within the context of unified products. Many customers have been utilizing Hitachi Vantara for several years, relying on its storage capabilities. They appreciate its reliable roadmaps, which facilitate long-term planning. This makes it an effortless choice for customers to opt for Hitachi Vantara, as the product seamlessly accommodates updates and future changes. The key focal point of the Hitachi Vantara roadmap for our clients is centered around future upgrades. Typically, customers undergo tech refresh cycles approximately every five years. Consequently, when they embark on a tech refresh initiative, they tend to prioritize options that facilitate a smooth transition of data to alternative storage solutions. In this context, Hitachi Vantara leverages its external storage virtualization platform to ensure a seamless data migration process. This approach proves to be highly advantageous for our customers, and it stands as a primary reason for their choice to engage with Hitachi Vantara's offerings. Our customers are highly satisfied with their choice to acquire Hitachi products and services. I have not observed any of our customers shifting away from the Hitachi brand. I would recommend Hitachi Vantara 100 percent of the time to others. There are tools that assist us in accessing the IOPS per second and latencies of Hitachi Vantara systems. One such tool is the CPK tool, accessible through the Hitachi Vantara portal. Whenever we configure a product and a customer requests information about the IOPS and latencies, we can provide them with a report from the portal. This report includes details about reads, writes, IOPS, and sequential operations, offering a comprehensive overview of the IOPS performance that Hitachi Vantara offers. The combination of low latency and high performance has consistently assisted customers in improving their production and enhancing their working experience. It also aids them in easily managing the product, giving them time to expand their knowledge and plan for the future, rather than dealing with storage-related issues. The cost comparison of IOPS between our solutions and those of competitors is favorable at present, but this wasn't always the case. In the Pakistani market, Huawei used to be highly competitive. However, our current partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to pose a strong challenge to Huawei. Additionally, when considering products from NetApp, EMC, and even IBM, Hitachi remains highly competitive. Hitachi offers flexible media options to support the consolidation of multiple uses within the same platform which is important to our customers. Most of our customers utilize Unified Storage, employing a two-tier storage approach that includes both NVMe and SSDs. However, current trends indicate a shift in customer preferences towards NVMe over SAAS or SSDs due to the heightened reliability and increased cost-effectiveness of NVMe technology. This transition is driving many customers to adopt a comprehensive NVMe solution. Nonetheless, a substantial number of large customers still adhere to the two-tier storage model. For their primary tier, they employ NVMe drives, while for the secondary tier, they opt for NFS drives or a SAAS-based large-scale service. The integration of various use cases into a unified platform to facilitate the transformation of data into business insights is highly valuable. We receive input from our customers regarding their workloads. Based on the nature of these workloads and their intended use for storage – whether for ERP solutions, archives, or backup purposes – we recommend the appropriate storage type. These steps outline our process for evaluating the intended storage workload. Following this workload assessment, we suggest either NAS Unified Storage or Document Storage solutions. In the portal, there is a tool that enables us to calculate Hitachi's guaranteed effective capacity. It is quite straightforward for customers to comprehend and identify the effective capacity ratio. This is because many customers in Pakistan are already familiar with and using effective capacity ratios. Explaining the concept of effective capacity to customers is not a challenging task. Customers typically appreciate the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform due to its efficiency, easy product manageability, and product reliability, all of which offer significant benefits to the customers. This is crucial, especially in sectors like banking, where any breach or downtime could lead to substantial losses for customers. The uninterrupted operation of storage is paramount. This substantial benefit not only ensures customer satisfaction but also underscores the value derived from data utilization. Hitachi's adaptive data reduction technology assists in decreasing our client's storage footprint by around 50 percent. The majority of our customers were using storage from various vendors. We consolidated this storage into a single system using Hitachi Vantara.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"It offers competitive performance, and the Evergreen storage model of Pure fits well with my organization."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"The solution is scalable."

"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."

"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."

"They have a feature called Live Migrate; it's been very, very useful."

"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."

"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."

"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."

"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."

"The setup and installation is much simpler now, because Dell has standardized the configure process."

More Dell SC Series pros

"Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series exhibits good performance and has good IOPS: 300 IOPS. The technical support for this product is also good."

"It's a state of the art solution in storage systems. High-availability and performance are the strongest aspects of these machines."

"One of the features, for us, that is important is the monitoring platform integrated into the solution. It has all the elements that we need to see, at all times, to be sure the platform is working right."

"The deduplication is useful for us because we don't have that much money for our lab infrastructure. Deduplication means we have more storage available. And the IOPS are really fast."

"The hybrid array provides scaleable, predictable, high performance with no capacity constraints."

"The product provides a good storage space."

"It is very flexible, and it is very useful when you want to virtualize different storage from different vendors."

"What I like best about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series is that it's a fast storage solution. It also has reliable models. The sales support is also good for this product. Even the pricing for it is good."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pros

Cons

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"There are some challenges with data encryption and reduction."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"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."

"The tool's pricing is high and not suitable for medium companies."

"The price could be improved."

"In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage."

"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."

"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."

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

"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."

More Dell SC Series cons

"The distributor needs more knowledgeable resources for technical support. It would be better to connect directly to the vendor in case of queries."

"It seemed like every time we turned around it was a statement of work and we'd have to pay for something that our previous vendors would not have billed us for."

"I would like to see Hitachi improve their management software. It's been three years since they introduced Ops Center, their management product, and it still hasn't reached at least 50 percent of the capability we require. We are using legacy software because the product Hitachi offers does not stack up in functionality."

"The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, I find the management aspect not as good as their hardware."

"The complex setup phase is an area where improvements are needed."

"Hitachi should launch some small machines in Brazil. The smallest machine here in Brazil is VSP 350, which can be quite big for some of the customers. In China, Hitachi has small models of this equipment, but those models are not available in our region. Its pricing is a big issue for us. We are resellers, and we face some competition from other vendors. Hitachi doesn't always have a good position in terms of the price. Its user interface is also not as good as some of the other competitors, and it can be improved."

"The admin tools in the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform definitely have certain shortcomings that require improvement."

"In terms of new features, I would be interested to see deduplication added in their next release."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The pricing of Dell EMC Compellent is competitive."

"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."

"This solution could be better priced in comparison with other vendors."

"We have the basic license for the use of this solution and it is a permanent license. The overall cost could be less, it is expensive."

"The scalability seems a bit more expensive than even buying a brand new one so far. That has been kind of a drawback."

"It's a very affordable solution."

"We have reviewed many platforms over the years. It is probably the best solution for its value."

"It's absolutely affordable. Again, not having to do a forklift upgrade like some of the others have had to do in the past, it's very affordable for our customers and they continue to buy."

More Dell SC Series pricing and cost advice

"In our company, we only pay towards the licensing charges associated with Forcepoint, as Hitachi is considered to be a third-party product for us."

"The price of the solution is reasonable compared to others, such as Dell EMC."

"It is expensive. Everything is included in the license. There is no additional cost."

"The cost price of this product is better than its competitors."

"It is a little expensive."

"I give the price of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform a nine out of ten."

"It is expensive as compared to other vendors, but its price is good if you are looking for stability, reliability, performance, and security."

"This is an expensive solution."

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

21%

University

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell SC Series?

I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?

Cost considerations are crucial when choosing between solutions like Dell and NetApp. Sometimes Dell offers better pe...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?

In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage. If I want...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform?

For NVMe storage, the pricing is reasonable compared to competitors in India. However, for entry-level SAN storage or...

See all answers

What do you like most about Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The product's reliability has been crucial for our company's operations.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform E990?

The interface management and monitoring need improvement. Although I receive emails from Hitachi Virtual Storage Plat...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 32% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell SC Series

Compared 61% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Dell SC Series

Compared 9% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell SC Series

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell SC Series

Compared 6% of the time

More Dell SC Series Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 14% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Alletra Storage vs Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Compared 7% of the time

More Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series

April 2025

Download Dell SC Series product report

Buyer's Guide

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

March 2025

Download Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

SC Series Storage, Compellent

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series, 5000 Series, E Series, N Series, G Series

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell EMC SC Series arrays provide a unified platform for the ultimate in performance, adaptability and machine-driven efficiency. SC Series software delivers modern features that help you meet aggressive workload demands using the fewest drives necessary. With an open, future-ready design, SC Series storage integrates seamlessly with applications and infrastructure, enabling you to scale on a single platform and add capabilities without forklift upgrades.

Dell Technologies

RETHINK YOUR DEFINITION OF SPEED AND PERFORMANCE

With adaptive, guaranteed data reduction and a 100% data-availability guarantee, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F series helps you tackle complicated business challenges. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) VSP F series delivers up to 4.8M IOPS with sub-millisecond response times.
Featuring legendary Hitachi reliability, VSP F series arrays are backed by the industries only 100% availability guarantee. For these reasons, 80% of the Fortune 500 choose Hitachi all-flash arrays to accelerate the performance of mission-critical applications like Oracle, SAP, Virtualization, Microsoft apps etc. With over 350 patents in flash technology, Hitachi’s innovative mix of flash hardware and software accelerates ROI with enterprise-class reliability and performance.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric

Turkcell, Owens Corning, Region Nord, Net Credit Financial Group (NFC Group), Russian Railways

Buyer's Guide

Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

April 2025

Free Report: Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell SC Series vs. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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