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Dell SC Series vs VMAX [EOL] comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Dell SC Series
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Frame-Based Disk Arrays (2nd), All-Flash Storage (20th)
VMAX [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

RK
System Administrator at Lovely Professional University
Storage solutions accommodate diverse drives and offers good resiliency
Technical support is good. I can log complaints online through the portal and have engineers in line. I can also take dedicated engineers if needed, although this involves a different support cost. As far as my requirements are concerned, it is working fine. There are two or three types of support. Standard support involves logging a complaint and receiving a call from the OEM on the same day, but hardware replacement takes two to three days. Advanced support offers instant replacement without delays. Hardware support terms include calling or emailing the company or logging the call in the portal to receive remote support, or getting a dedicated engineer or account manager from Dell.
Ali Yazıcı - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Service Manager at Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank
Good interface that is customizable, and the technical support is good
Our primary use of this product is for our core banking servers over FC It is a high end storage, minimal downtime, reliable, good performance, get speedy support when we need. The user interface is good, and it is also customizable. snap and clone operations easy.  Stability and availability…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"In terms of stability, it's good enough. It's okay."
"Technical support has been quite good; we are very satisfied with the level of support we receive."
"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."
"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 like the SC Series, I enjoy working with it, and with its auto-tiering and hybrid mix of SSDs and spinning disks, customers can revitalize their whole storage system completely without needing expensive all-flash arrays."
"VMAX is more scalable and has better performance (gives more IOPS, more front end ports...)."
"We have never had a bad experience with it because we never had failures. It has good data availability and the performance is also okay."
"It works with our replication technology, which is not SRDF, which is native replication technology."
"The most valuable features are the interface and performance."
"This product has enabled dynamic allocation of disk resources, and at the same time, improved the data access speed and application performance by a large extent."
"The interface is good, and it is also customizable."
"VMAX3 is our main system for storage. All our systems and all our virtualizations are connected to it. In terms of expanding it, we are replacing it with a new system, the PowerMax 2000. So our current VMAX3 platform will be decommissioned soon. We are switching to PowerMax 2000 because we are looking for improved performance. We see it as the best fit for our requirements in terms of the performance and the overall cost."
"EMC has made remarkable improvements in the overall management simplicity."
 

Cons

"In the future, I want any box that comes on-premises to have the provision to integrate with cloud storage."
"While the price is competitive, in the next release it would be better if they could reduce the fees."
"Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"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 call 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."
"An issue we had was that the controller went down during an upgrade because of their upgrading the code. One side of the switch was down."
"Some menus aren't so intuitive."
"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."
"Resilience replication, reporting, and performance need to be improved."
"Cost of the hardware tends to be high, however, you do get what you pay for."
"I would like to see support for high-availability."
"It is still expensive."
"Be aware that buying a Symmetrix VMAX is like owning a McLaren F1 race car; consider yourself lucky to drive it at the track since everything else must be performed by McLaren."
"I'd like to see improvements where we can scale out an existing array and remove older controllers\drives\etc., within the same subsystem."
"Stability and availability should be improved."
"Better speed to release new features that have become industry standards. EMC created so many standards in the past. Now, it seems they are playing a me-too game and lagging behind in some areas, specifically data reduction."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The maintenance is usually pretty good. It's not like some of the others where they increase it in the fourth, fifth, or sixth years."
"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."
"It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features."
"We have found the solution to be affordable."
"The pricing is reasonable, but it is expensive."
"Pricing depends on varying life cycles."
"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."
"There are additional costs to the standard licensing fee, and it just depends on the package."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Our licensing fees are billed on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Performing Arts
13%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business26
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell SC Series?
In our case, we received favorable pricing with Dell because of our strong partnership. While I acknowledge that Dell SC Series can be expensive for many companies, we received good discounts. The ...
What needs improvement with Dell SC Series?
For us, it is a great product. The deduplication and compression could potentially be improved, though they are already good. We cannot identify any significant areas that need improvement.
What is your primary use case for Dell SC Series?
We use Dell SC Series in a VMware environment.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

SC Series Storage, Compellent
Symmetrix VMAX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TGen, Frost Science, Gerrie Electric
Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, Kindred Healthcare, Cosentry, Sumitomo Life Insurance Company, Shriners, BZWBK
Find out what your peers are saying about Hitachi Vantara, Dell Technologies, IBM and others in Frame-Based Disk Arrays. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.