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Dell SC Series vs HPE 3PAR StoreServ comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

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
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (6th)
Dell SC Series
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (2nd)
HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
303
Ranking in other categories
NAS (9th), Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell SC Series is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE 3PAR StoreServ is 3.0%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Steven McClendon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Muhammad Saqib - PeerSpot reviewer
Uninterrupted upgrades accelerate performance with good support
I would rate the solution eight out of ten. It should be noted that in Pakistan, some parts are not readily available, and we need to import them from Singapore or other countries. We encountered an issue with a customer where the midplane failed and was not available. We had to wait for several days for a replacement, even in a 24/7 support case. Additionally, we faced motherboard failures in the customer's environment, encountering two motherboard failures simultaneously. We obtained one motherboard immediately, yet had to wait ten days for another. These issues should have been resolved promptly given the 24/7 support level.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool's valuable features are speed, security, data compression, and reliability. Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen. It helps us to save money and resources."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The database workloads are pretty fast because I frequently move data from here to there."
"I appreciate the performance."
"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The solution has a wide variety of valuable features. The data progression works well. We use the snapshot functionality quite a bit and really like it."
"One of the most valuable features is the capability to switch between all-flash to hybrid, which have have actually done for one of our arrays. We started with the hybrid, with the limited if I'm not mistaken, and then over a period of time, we swapped all the hybrids with the SSDs. This was one of the big features because it gave us the capability to not stick with just one kind of media. Secondly, since it has sorted clustering, we were able to bring in the newer boxes and have it all clustered together. These were the two main features that we really looked into, which benefited our use case from an expansion/growth perspective. Another valuable feature is the ease of management."
"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."
"A valuable feature is the performance of the auto-tiering. It will move hot data up to your fastest Tier 1 or move your slow data down. Data progression is what it's called. With the auto-tiering you can have multiple tiers, you can have your Tier 1 be either spinning or flash, all the way down to 7.2K. It will change the RAID on the fly so your writes come in at RAID 10. After they sit for a while, they get converted to RAID 5, then they'll cool off and move down the tiers. Your performance is kept going, while the cold data is moved to your slow, non-performance tiers."
"It is just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"Its leading feature is the price-performance ratio, which is very good."
"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 to that direction."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"It has improved uptime, as well as speed to delivery."
"The support is really fast. There is very good support for 3PAR storage."
"The predictive analytics, where we're getting notifications prior to a failure has been helpful."
"You can have SSD drives, fast disk drives, and slower drives, redundancy between drives, and hot-swappable drives on the SSDs, the faster hard drives, and the slower drives."
"The solution is easy to install."
"The 3PAR tool is cheaper to maintain with more storage available."
"For virtualization, the failure rate is much less compared to traditional storage where you need more hard drives"
"It all works in concert using Recovery Manager Central (RMC). HPE coordinates it all, so it is more of a solution instead of products trying to do things together."
 

Cons

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Maybe the price can be reduced since the solution is very expensive."
"It is on the expensive side."
"I would like to see some AI features that would allow arrays to intelligently identify threats or unusual behavior in the data pattern and give an alert."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."
"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."
"The connection should be better integrated with the network to offer a better view of the system."
"We had times that we needed a file service solution. We've used FluidFS, but it's a solution that is being transitioned out."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"Dell SC Series is no longer available, while Dell PowerStore, which supports NVMe over TCP, is different and not very affordable."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"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, as 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"
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"In new releases, I'd really like to see it more targeted towards hyper-converged. They are working that way with Greenlake and integrating their own "build your own" expansion environment within 3PAR."
"I would like to be able to deploy and manage 3PAR within OneView Global Dashboard so we do not have to use the interface for 3PAR."
"From an overall perspective, all the latest technologies can improve support and performance. This is very important for us."
"Sadly, the support from HPE has not been all that great. It is tough to get a tech out or get a response from some of the techs that we have."
"We have had some challenges in the Arabic implementation and in migration, but for daily work, it's fine."
"The speed of the hard disk could be better. The performance is the main issue for us. The performance of the VMs is not comparable to desktop machines, for instance, and we might need another solution to improve the performance. Other than that, we don't have any issues. We already have a great part of storage with SSDs, and the performance is not as good as I expected."
"If HPE 3PAR could handle NAS and all things related to NAS, you would not need to have a mixture of different storages, storage boxes, one solution could fit all."
"HPE gives you how to get everything going, but it would be nice if they could go a little deeper sometimes. That is always the case: To get the value-add, you have to pay for those services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."
"The product is expensive."
"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."
"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."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."
"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."
"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."
"It's a very affordable solution."
"We have found the solution to be affordable."
"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."
"This product is too expensive compared to others, and I don't see any value in using it."
"It is one of the most cost effective systems for us. We have been able to run it longer than most, getting the most benefit and money out of it."
"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."
"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."
"There are costs involving the solution, vendor fees and product safety which are additional."
"We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward."
"For the price that we were able to acquire it, we have seen it give us the performance and stability that we require to run our enterprise."
"Making the decisions to buy it can be complex."
"We have seen ROI. While the costs were quite high at the time of purchase for our environment, the ease of use and the fact that it hasn't failed all the time, working fine, that makes it worth buying."
"It is lower in price as compared to other vendors, such as Dell. As compared to Huawei, all storage solutions are expensive, including this one."
"The solution has two parts: software and hardware, and you need to buy licenses for some features."
"This licensing fees for this solution are merged with all of our HP annual costs, which in total are a couple hundred thousand dollars."
"The price of the solution could be reduced for the license and for support."
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Comparison Review

it_user182013 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 1, 2015
Measuring Up: EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR
Leading up to EMC World 2015, IT Central Station asked how I would compare EMC XtremIO and HP 3PAR. Until recently, the flash storage conversation in my organization and many others has centered on XtremIO and Pure Storage, the leaders of the all-flash array (AFA) space. To that end, I've written a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
50%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

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.
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
What's the difference between HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Primera?
HPE Primera has many great features but one of the best is that it is very easy to deploy. From an overall perspectiv...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE 3PAR StoreServ?
It is expensive, however, when we compare it to the features provided by HPE, the price-to-performance ratio is very ...
 

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X
SC Series Storage, Compellent
HPE 3PAR Flash Storage, InServ, Storeserv, 3PAR Flash Storage, HP Enterprise Storage, 3PAR Flash Array, HP 3PAR Flash Storage
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company
TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Just Energy, Latisys, team AG, DreamWorks, BlueShore Financial, Erasmus MC
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell SC Series vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.