Dell SC Series Reviews

We use it for storage. The performance is great. So far there are no issues at all.

The benefits are the reliability and the performance. That is what we look for and it works great for us.

It's secure and fast. There's no downtime and the HA works great. Everything is easy and their support is great. 

Mostly, during an upgrade process, there is no downtime at all. The way they do is really great. Very easy, straightforward. There is a pre-check and then, when they finish it, they do a post-check. It's great the way they do the upgrade, no downtime at all.

Something that has been needed should be coming out with the 6.7 version of vSphere: You don't need a hot spare, so that should give you more IOPS. They've figured out how to do a RAID across all the drives, rather than using a hot spare. So the hot spare can be used too. You won't need a dedicated hot spare any longer.

Scalability is fine. It's much easier. I can add more drives and just keep on adding stuff if I want to. Of course, that affects your price point.

We've had great support from the Dell EMC team. I would rate their Copilot support the best that we have seen in the industry. I have used support with every vehicle we have, but their support is the best. Great engineers. Great engineering team. It's straightforward, easy, and you get the right people.

We were previously using Compellent. At the time we went with Compellent we looking for a solution which was affordable for us. We are a non-profit organization and it worked great from that point of view. They were new, they had this great solution. We looked at it and we said, "Okay, it is at our price point and it works great. Let's get it and done." Dell EMC acquired it but they continued the same support and it worked fine.

When selecting a vendor, what I look for is a good technical solution. As a technical guy, that's all I look for.

I engineered the solution, architected it with their support. We have also upgraded several times.

I think our ROI has been good. We used Compellent for seven years and it worked great. We didn't have any major downtime or major performance issue. We're already three years into the SC Series, so I hope I can use it for four more years. That would be a good ROI.

So far, the solution has been affordable for us. We have a 48-drive solution and that works great for our headquarters site. Their pricing goes by the number of physical drives that you have and the drives are not cheap. Whenever you want to upgrade something there is a price issue. For example, for a 4TB SSD, they may charge you seven grand or eight grand. It's expensive. So we try to get the maximum use out of what we have, for five to seven years, and then upgrade it.

We were looking at HPE, and we had looked at a product called OSNEXUS. They operate in the same town as us so we thought we could get support from them. We looked at five or six products.

We actually went with two solutions. In India, we are using OSNEXUS, which is located in the Seattle area. We use Dell EMC in our headquarters.

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.

We use the SC platform for storage solutions. As a partner, it's usually one of our go-to products for mid-range customers.

When it comes to mid-range storage solutions, it's usually our preferred solution, from all-flash all the way up to hybrid solutions too. Over time, the technology and how it performs, and its tiering capability, have been successful for us.

• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Performance
• Value for price

They've actually already done something that I think is needed, which is integration with Unisphere, which is the Dell EMC management platform, and then CloudIQ is their performance analytics solution. So they've actually implemented things that people have been asking for.

In addition, in any platform, there is always room for improvement. We're always looking for performance increases and keeping up with flash devices, and new products that are coming out.

It's a very stable product.

Honestly, most of the complaints I hear about this solution are either because systems have been misconfigured or sized improperly. Probably 90 percent of the issues people have are because it's not sized properly.

It's very scalable. They have solutions designed for SMB all the way up to enterprise customers with multiple petabytes of data. The SC Series is one of the two mid-market products for Dell EMC, so there is absolutely room for their solutions to grow with a company's needs.

Regarding Copilot - which is what they called their support, pre-Dell EMC - people have always had nothing but great things to say about it.

We use it for our production loads and for whatever is running on all the production VMs, including our database and regular applications. In terms of performance, we have had issues once or twice, but apart from that, it has been amazing.

With mixed workloads, we are seeing at least a 15 to 20 percent improvement. The protocols also make it easier than in days past. We just follow the process. Finally, instead of buying new storage, with the thin nodes in this solution we are leveraging almost a one-to-two ratio.

The most valuable features are the back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio. 

The 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.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see some kind of I/O meter, to indicate what we are using in terms of performance. I would like to see automation with that, where it would give me the trends. I want to know these things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur. We want to see the trends, performance-wise.

The stability is perfect. That's why we keep on using Dell EMC products in particular.

The scalability is okay. We buy a new product so that we do not reach the limit. For example, if we are anticipating storage needs of 60 or 80TB, we buy a 100TB. We plan at least 25 percent more, in advance, so we haven't had the chance to scale them up.

Our experience with technical support has been absolutely wonderful. They have a pretty good team.

The solution is affordable, but we are a large customer with Dell EMC and we have corporate level discounts. Having said that, everybody definitely, obviously, wants the cost to be lower. And now there is All-Flash and its price is going down day by day.

We don't want Dell EMC to be a monopoly, as our only product. So we do have a competition, which helps with price negotiation. We have NetApp products as well, that's the main competitor. Technology-wise, we compare a few workloads there, a few workloads here. Doing so also helps us avoid any major downtime, any major outages.

We'll attend trade shows, and Dell EMC will also call us to give us a technical briefing. At that time they explain the differences between the old and new products. Then, we'll look at the budget we have and the anticipated production with that solution, and go from there.

We have an internal process. We have to go through all the vendors and weigh metrics we have defined. From there, we have to explain to our internal architecture team what the differences are between the competing products. They will then approve or reject at that point.

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.

We use it for storage. We have gotten really good performance out of it, fast IOPS.

We don't use the hybrid solution, or the built-in data migration capabilities, protocols, or DIP inline upgrades.

It's faster than our last storage system. It brings efficiencies with it. 

• Easy to configure
• Reliable

Very stable. We rarely have any types of issues or failures.

It's easy to scale, easy to add on to.

I have used technical support. I received good customer service and I was able to get my questions answered. It took them just a couple of hours to get back to me.

Our company, overall, has an Enterprise License Agreement with Dell EMC, so we transitioned off of older systems on to Dell EMC hardware. Our last storage solution was end-of-life so we wouldn't even have been able to get support through the original vendor, we would have had to go third-party. We decided not to do that, we decided to buy new.

The most important features when selecting a vendor are stability, scalability, and ease of use.

The initial setup was very easy to do. Straightforward.

Our support costs are less.

Compared to other solutions out there, it's affordable. It would be nice if the cost was even lower.

NetApp and Nimble were on our shortlist.

We use it for running all our business workloads.

it allows us to grow service on demand.

Usually, we have pretty low latency. Our storage is less than 10ms, which is pretty good. No dramas there. That's pretty good performance.

For what it's doing today there isn't too much that I think they need to add to it. It's doing what it needs to do.

The stability is quite good. I have nothing but good things to say about it.

The scalability is pretty good. We have had no problems at this point.

Technical support is really good. We have had good, high-quality support with our SC Series. They respond quickly.

It's very similar to our previous storage, which made the transition to start using it easy. That was pretty good. We had been using EqualLogic storage. We switched because our old solution went end-of-life.

The setup was pretty good. We got the support people, Professional Services people, to come in and install it. It was fine.

It's definitely affordable. Of course, it would be better if they made it cheaper, even more affordable.

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

We use Dell EMC storage at two data center sites for hosting vSphere server environments. Those server services are something that we offer internally in the company: SharePoint, GIS mapping services, license servers, and domain controllers. Pretty much everything is hosted on those servers or on the storage.

It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication.

• I would like the ability to monitor and manage the storage.  
• The web GUI is not fully there. 
• I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app.

The solution is stable. We have not had too many problems. The issues that have come up have been addressed very quickly via Dell EMC. 

It is scalable. You can easily add-on storage to the core platform. 

I like using the technical support. Their support is set up where they actually get notified before we do if there's an issue. Thus, they are very proactive about issues.

It has a good price point and offers some value-added enterprise features.

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.

We primarily use it to support our customers. We are a managed service provider.

We have private and public clouds that we use it for. 

The performance over the years has been great. We like the platform and the upgrade features that it has. The biggest thing which we like is the support that we receive.

We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads. Therefore, we are getting great performance. Our customers have been very satisfied because they use a wide range of applications.

We use the data migration utilities a lot. We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another. 

It allows us to focus on what we want to do. We want to work with our customers, helping them with their applications. We've had only a few times that we have to call into support for additional performance to make sure everything is working well. Each time, the support teams come back and show us areas that we need to strengthen on, and our customers have been very happy.

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

The auto-tiering feature is one of the key reasons that we do use the SC Series platform. It was cost effective and allowed us to have high-end 15K discs, then auto-tier those down to 7K discs, which gave us the best value for our money.

We had times that we needed a file service solution. We've used FluidFS, but it's a solution that is being transitioned out.

It is very stable. Upgrades have been pretty much flawless. Being able to swap out components and upgrade them later on has also been a huge benefit in keeping the platform cost effective.

It is very scalable. It's been able to function for all its assigned workloads.

Their support is probably the best I have ever worked with.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

I was able to utilize the Dell EMC support team and have everything installed and upgraded.

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.

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

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. 

We use it in our production and environmental support along with our VDI infrastructure. 

It has been working to our expectations.

Compared to some of the hardware that we support, from an infrastructure operator standpoint, I never had any problems with the system.

We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues.

It has been one of the most stable products in our data center.

We have not had to scale yet.

We have found the solution to be affordable.

Do your research if you are looking into this product.

I am very happy with it.