We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and Dell Unity XT 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."It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"The interface is easy to use which makes the product user-friendly."
"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."
"Customers are most impressed with SC's provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront. It's pay-as-you-grow. It also has solid compression and duplication features."
"The most valuable feature is the no-forklift upgrade. While the thing is running, I can change out the controllers one at a time and keep the customer up and running. I can add shelves and storage and SSD drives or spinning drives to the system, while it's running. I can bring all that in and rebalance the load across the new disks or, if we take disks away, rebalance the load across what's remaining, and it just works."
"With auto-tiering, it's easier to understand than most arrays, knowing that all of your writes go to the tier that you specify, with easy-to-create storage profiles."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"It is fast and performs well."
"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."
"The most valuable aspects of this solution are its stability, performance, and ease of updating."
"Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios"
"The initial setup was very straightforward. Migration was smooth and configuration of the storage was quick and simple. The time needed to put it into production was less than expected, and data migration itself went without a glitch."
"I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it."
"I have found Dell EMC Unity XT to be stable."
"The most valuable thing for our use case is the flexibility to have multiple-protocol support."
"It is scalable. We can add additional tools if we need to expand it."
"We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"It needs to improve its price."
"I feel like there is too much automation; the user doesn't have any manual input."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"The cost of the solution could be better."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"The configuration could be easier in Dell EMC SC Series."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"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."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement."
"Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots."
"We have only used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvements suggestions yet."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection."
"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."
"I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good."
"Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed."
"I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 188 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell SC Series vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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