We performed a comparison between Dell PowerMax NVMe and Dell SC Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"The solution is scalable."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable feature is its global cache, which allows for uncompromised performance."
"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"It is easy to manage and upgrade."
"The response time, compared to XtremIO, is far better."
"Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model."
"CloudIQ has become an optimal tool for us to get the full picture of all the different arrays, from mid-tier all the way up. It gives us that single view and the ability to launch the Unisphere. That is really is powerful in being able to manage the array."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"Everything is sub-5 MS 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."
"With federation, you can have multiple systems across sites. You can treat them as one, and with a live migration, volumes don't go down. You can move them from site to site, doing maintenance, and keep your environment up."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"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."
"The user interface is good, I would rate it a nine out of ten."
"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."
"We see very low latency with very high IOPS for mixed workloads."
"I've found the stability to be very good."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"We need better data deduplication."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"Since the merging of EMC and Dell into Dell Technologies, there has been a hurdle that they've had to overcome, and they're not over it yet. It takes two to three times longer for things to get fixed than it did when they were separate companies. That is something that has to be fixed."
"The solution does not use new versions of OS and patches. Its installation is also difficult. The solution is not as fast as other storage in the market."
"The initial setup was complex, as it is a complex system and you have to learn a lot."
"I would like it to support NVMe over Fabrics, because that is the next item for consideration on the NVMe roadmap. PowerMax supports NVMe on the back-end, but when it starts supporting NVMe over Fibre Channel, suddenly various hosts can directly communicate with PowerMax, and with NVMe-oF, as well. Suddenly, Gen 6 and Gen 7 switchers will be able to help facilitate that particular communication channel."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"The initial setup was a little bit complicated."
"The REST API needs improvement. We are a very big automation company, and this would be big for us."
"The installation of equipment needed support's help."
"I would like to improve the processing ability."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"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."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell SC Series is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Dell Unity XT, Pure Storage FlashArray and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and IBM System Storage DS8000 Series. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell SC Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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