Dell SC Series Reviews

We're a large financial institution and we use them at our branch sites. They're definitely not enterprise-grade, but where we need to have an all-flash solution for applications, and a smaller footprint, that's where we use them.

The performance has been excellent.

The performance benefits weren't surprising, we expected that. What we didn't expect were the densification benefits that we got out of going all-flash. We're able to put more applications on the arrays because of how all-flash performs. The way some of the application profiles have responded to all-flash has been really pleasing. We got both a CapEx benefit and a benefit on the performance side.

Everything is sub-5ms for us. What I've found is that with all-flash, when an app from my business is slow, I pretty much know it's them and not me. It leads to a performance conversation that has really hit an interesting threshold point where we are better than what they need. So now we get to have that "refactoring your application" conversation a lot quicker because now the performance on the infrastructure side isn't in question anymore.

From an organizational perspective, the benefits are really around the decrease in performance-related issues. From an application perspective, when you think about incident management, those people are now spending their time very differently, where we have the SC Series deployed. It really has allowed us to advance a CapEx conversation, where our business partners, our LOBs, are actually behind us because they're seeing the benefit, real-time, in operations: the request for business cases to refresh environment instead of trying to sweat the current assets; now they're seeing the value prop. So we have a lot of people coming to the table supporting the expense, supporting that CapEx, perhaps a year or two sooner than they normally would have, because they understand.

Being a managing director I don't get "under the cover" as much as I used to, but what I can tell you from what my teams say is that it is a lot less intensive from a performance-troubleshooting perspective. The management software is a lot cleaner. We typically don't have performance issues anymore so our operations team gets to spend their time in different ways. We're getting to spend a lot more time thinking about how to deploy more efficiently and how to be creative about I/O profiles and tiering, in ways that we didn't get to do before, because we were troubleshooting performance issues, issues that we don't have now because of all-flash.

Overall, I'd like to see more synergy between Dell EMC's higher-tier platforms and their mid-tier platforms. What I have said, constantly, to my partners at Dell EMC is that the clear articulation of the path is really important to us.

In that vein, what I'd also like to see is, with the migration strategy that's built into this product, a lot more attention paid to Dell's - in particular - legacy platforms and how we get from some of our legacy EMC platforms onto this platform with a straight-through migration and scaling strategy, not host-based migrations and not piecemeal. What I've found is that when it comes to the "enablement wrapper," that's what I like to call it, or the "services wrapper," that is wrapped around this whole idea of a transition from legacy to new, Dell EMC would do well to focus more on my ability to skip a generation, rather than having me take individual hops because I can't greenfield my way into a software-defined data center fast enough. This journey of multiple hops is not helpful.

So far, I haven't had an incident, so the stability is good. No downtime.

It scales as well as the previous mid-range capability we had. I think for us, because we're in a situation where we're in flux between fiber channel and IP, I'm probably not the best person to relate to this question because a lot of our scalability issues have more to do with the network transformation that we're under and less so with the product.

We have in the neighborhood of 15,000 VMs.

We always invest. We're on a five-year depreciation cycle. At year-five, we do an evaluation of whether or not, from a refresh perspective, we need to move forward. The virtualization that's going on in our data center impacts that. In addition, we are green-fielding right now to software-defined storage, so some of these solutions are actually considered legacy right now. Applications are not refactoring at the same rate at which there is a desire to become software-defined, so we still have physical servers, some of which rely on fiber channel. Some of them, we can't even get to refactor into IP-based storage, even if it were still using a monolithic array. We have to provide our customers with what they need, so the need to invest has to do with meeting our customers' demands.

When looking at a vendor the most important criteria for me, specifically, are stability and reliability. Performance would be second, but stability and reliability are ultimately the most important thing. We have mission-critical applications and they just cannot fail.

To be honest with you, as a financial institution, I don't think we spend a lot of time thinking about ROI. We are so large, and our scale is so huge, that the economics that we're able to get out of Dell EMC when we go to the table, are quite remarkable.

For us, once you put a five-year depreciation cycle on top of that, we really don't have an ROI issue. What we're really about is ease of management, about automation, about understanding performance impacts, and that densification piece which really helps to pay the bill. 

The one thing I can say, from an ROI perspective, is that the overall densification increase that we've seen, because of how flash seems to be operating with some of these application profiles, has definitely lead to a much better ROI. But it's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

The partnership that we have with Dell EMC is great, so we always get to a solution that is affordable. We are A Dell EMC shop and we have been for a long time. A lot of that is not just because of the strength of the brand. A lot of that is because they build the best storage. For us, being enterprise-critical and having applications that process lots of transactions every day, we can't take chances on our applications and the ability of our storage to be reliant. Performance is important. Cost is absolutely important, but we're always willing to spend a little bit more for what we consider to be the best.

We're a multi-vendor shop. We do that on purpose to make sure that each vendor gives us their best. HPE was on the shortlist as well as some, what I consider to be up-and-comers, like Pure. They had a play but it wasn't a serious play. When it got down to the last two, HPE was the competition.

Do your homework. Get in the lab. Figure out what it does and doesn't do. Figure out what's different. Understand your I/O profiles. Understand your applications. Think about how you want to best choose your app mix, when it comes to what's possible. Often, when people go all-flash for the first time, especially in the mid-range, they might be a little surprised at what's possible. Rack one up, fully populate it with disk, and really see what you can get out of it before you make assumptions around what you need and how your applications are going to behave.

We have not used the built-in capabilities for migration yet. What we're looking forward to is understanding the opportunity to possibly use these as a migration weigh-station between some of our older VMAXs or any of our other mid-tier storage platforms; where we might be able to use some of those migration solutions to help us get from legacy faster. We haven't done any migration between the two yet. All we've done is refresh tune-up.

I rate the solution an eight out of 10 because, overall, for the market that it's serving, it is just a really great product. For us, the extensibility that we've gotten in terms of being able to run multiple application workloads and still get a nice densification factor - and not have to worry a lot about over-provisioning and tiering or about a lot of the other things we used to have to worry about, thanks to the all-flash and the way that it operates - has been really nice. The management overhead is minimal. It just works. It's a workhorse.

We use it for storage for a virtual environment.

It has definitely improved our speed, storage space, and recovery times.

The most valuable feature is the speed for the end-user.

The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it.

I would also like to see all-in-one appliances. That's what I'm here, at VMworld 2018, to look at.

The stability is okay, and the maintenance response time is excellent.

The scalability is endless.

Technical support is perfect. We use it all the time. 

We were using Dell EMC servers and then went to the virtual environment.

The most important factor for me, when selecting a vendor, is reliability. I have been using Dell EMC since day one and I'm not willing to switch at this point.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was straightforward.

The value that we've seen is a reduction in costs: virtualization versus physical servers.

It's a very affordable solution.

We do not use the hybrid solution yet.

I would rate the solution we are currently using at eight out of 10. Moving to the next performance level would make it a 10. And for this particular solution, the only thing I would like to see improved is the price.

It acts as our VM storage, and the performance is good.

It could be hyperconvergent in the future.

Stability is good so far.

The scalability is very good because we can add up to, if I'm not mistaken, another three stacks, three cases. There is room for us to keep upgrading the capacity.

The Phone Home support is very good. It provides proactive troubleshooting and responds to end-customers like us.

We also have a local vendor to support us and all our IT infrastructure. They are acting as our consultant.

Initially, when we chose this product it was because of the cost component and because the service was very good.

For me, when selecting a vendor the most important issue is support, after-sale services.

The initial setup was straightforward. Everything was done by the engineers on site. Very little was required of IT during the setup. So it was pretty easy for us.

We did do some comparisons between HPE 3PAR as well as Dell Compellent, but we choose Dell, as I mentioned, because of the cost factor.

The first thing you need to know is what you need, what your requirements are. The second thing is how much of a budget there is.

I rate Dell Compellent an eight out of 10. So far, we haven't faced any problems. Even during the upgrades, there have been no issues. In addition, support is very good.

It is performing well.

We have a bit more storage, and it is faster.

• Ease of use
• Reliability
• It is fast and performs well.

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

So far, so good. However, we have only had it running for four months.

Scalability is good. We still have more room.

We have not used technical support yet.

Our previous solution ran out of space and IOPS. Therefore, we had to get something which was faster.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, though I was not involved. A co-worker did it.

Only Dell EMC products were on our shortlist.

We did look at Nutanix, but they did not fit into the way that we are organized. We also looked at NetApps, but quickly dismissed them.

I would recommend to buy Dell EMC 3020 to anyone researching these type of solutions.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Reliability
• Support: We knew the support from EMC was really good.

There is no need to archive data and/or move data from expensive storage since the device does that itself depending on the use of the data. This is the data that you moved to the slower disks.

1. Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size.
2. Performance management: The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources.

Snapshots in VMware. You can’t do snapshots since the storage itself does that. Therefore, some apps (Veeam, for example) don’t work well with this kind of tiering storage.

No issues.

It is more difficult than others, since once you need to growth, you need to make sure what tier you will increase to in order to redistribute the data. It can take more time and planning, but is worth the effort.

Excellent, Copilot (support for Compellent) is excellent.

Yes, we used to have EMC and Hitachi Storage. The growth of storage was limited and price/performance were not good.

Initially, it can be difficult since you need to understand the tiering philosophy. It is very different to normal SAN deployments, but once you understand them, they are very straightforward.

Take your time to meet with your representative and tell them your needs and listen careful to every recommendation. Always keep in mind, this is not just a enclosure with disks is a complete SAN as a service. There is software, license, and storage in one single solution.

Yes, IBM's and HP's tiering solutions, but there are too expensive and bulky.

Document your needs, current storage, expansion, and timeframe for replays (snapshots). If you have backups or replications in place, make sure they work with Compellent Tiered Storage.

Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode), Fast Track.

Additional features like Live Volume, Chargeback, Sync Replication (Cascade/Mixed mode) and Fast Track makes this storage unique. Moreover, you can integrate your existing infrastructure--no matter whether it's FC or FCoE or iSCSI--with this unified storage solution. This means you don't need to buy a new storage solution for future escalation.

Improvement is a continuous process for every technology. Similarly, Compellent is improving its software (Storage Center) and releases updated version often.

One and a half years.

Not yet. But matching color coding during zoning is sometimes a little bit annoying.

No.

Not yet.

I don't have any complaints.

Excellent. I think EMC support service is equivalent of Copilot service of Compellent. And their response time is really good.

Switched from EqualLogic because of Unified scale out architecture. You can use this storage file and block level both. Further, if you consider with others OEM like EMC for unified solution you have to consider VNX 5200/5300 above. Whereas there is no model dependency on Compllent.

No issues. The installation and configuration is very simple.

Yes. I did the implementation. There is no doubt about Dell's expertise level. They have really an efficient and expert group of people.

Technically I can say that day to day cost is at a considerable level. Previously I told you if you consider 5-8 years solution then it'll minimize your day to day cost. Because, later to scale up your capacity you just need to add DAE (Disk Array Enclosure). That's all. And DAE is cheaper than buying a new storage for scale up capacity.

None.

Definitely I would like to say to all others, if you want good unified storage solution with satisfactory level ROI just go with Compellent. It'll give you flexibility, good ROI and you can integrate your existing infrastructure without facing complexity, no matter what kind of infrastructure you have (FC, iSCSI or FCoE).

Our use cases are related mostly to manufacturing industries. 

Dell SC Series' most valuable features are performance and network facilities. We have no issues with its integration. The tool helps to visualize servers. 

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

I have been working with the product for eight years. 

We have had no issues with the solution's stability. 

One client company has more than 5,000 users. Most of our customers have users between 500-1000. 

If customers have any issues, they can contact Dell support. 

Positive

The tool's deployment is not complex. It takes around two to five days to complete. 

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.