We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Pure Storage FlashArray 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."One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"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."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to replicate. We are running a financial company and it needs to be available 24/7. We can't afford any downtime."
"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 had many features, like a snapshot, replication, on-the-file RAID levels, mix-and-match files, those kinds of things."
"The most valuable features are the with back-end dedupe, and the thin nodes. For a 20TB or 60TB, we're using almost a one-to-two ratio."
"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."
"The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"The performance is very good."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"It simplifies building out the storage."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"It is on the expensive side."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"While there's always room for improvement in everything, I can't really think of a specific feature of the solution that requires immediate attention."
"The lower model, the 3000, should have duplication. It doesn't right now. It's only from 5000 that this is offered, but it depends on the performance. It could be they don't offer it on lower models because the duplication is too much of a burden to the performance."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"I would like to have an easy way to determine the cost per VM so that I can present a solution to our customers."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
Dell SC Series is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and NetApp AFF, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our Dell SC Series vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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