We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and NetApp AFF 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."Pure Storage FlashArray has significantly improved our data center performance. It handles high workloads efficiently, providing better performance in the environment. With increased storage capacity, it has led to improved overall system performance. The tool's technology is a standout feature. It has helped me reduce storage costs by 15 percent."
"Our storage phones home. It is smart and intelligent in that aspect, which has been huge for us. We don't have to be storage administrators."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"It has good stability for our company."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"We like the speed. It's very low latency. In virtualization, you can mask lots of problems, and even in code you can mask lots of problems, with low latency. It's just pure speed and low latency."
"It is always out of the box, and ready to use."
"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."
"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."
"The setup and installation is much simpler now, because Dell has standardized the configure process."
"One time, we had a drive fail and we were notified before we even saw it on the device."
"There's some new stuff coming with 7.3, which just got released, where they're spreading the sparing across the whole array, rather than having a dedicated spare disk, and have it sit there and do nothing until one of them dies, and then it kicks in - and having to rebuild all of that. Now, they'll do the sparing across all the disks and they say that is going to add not only space but performance to the array, with 7.3."
"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."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"The most valuable features are deduplication and compression, so we get more out of our storage. The replication is also important."
"This solution makes everything a lot faster. The time to move data around, boot and migrate VMs is much faster."
"The business copy solution has become faster using SnapMirror."
"We have SQL clusters across the United States. It has sped up our IOPS and made it a lot easier for users."
"It is a stable solution."
"Deduplication"
"All of the features are good. With Flash, we have high-performing databases. Having that kind of performance has been valuable."
"Technical support has been okay."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The scalability of the solution is not as good as it probably could be."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The SC Series doesn't support NVMe storage."
"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 those things easily, to help me know where issues are going to occur."
"It's not very efficient anymore. There are better products out there."
"I would like to see an integrated key manager in the controllers. Currently, it's an external product. It would be nice to have the option of having a built-in key for self-encrypting drive features."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"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."
"An 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 some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"I would like to see the ability to include more applications from applications to managed storage. If we can have more applications or more interface in more applications, that would be great."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"The support documentation has room for improvement."
"We have had issues with CIFS presentations and outages, so if that was removed, we could do seamless upgrades without affecting CIFS presentations. That would be an advantage. That's about the only improvement I can think of."
"NetApp could focus even more on the configuration."
"Customer service is one area of the product line where I would love to see improvement. I have had several vendor experiences with NetApp where I faced challenges in the initial call trying to navigate the requirements of the service level expectation. Their response could be better improved. However, the final result is great. It is just the initial support level where improvement would help to effectively solve problems."
"The ONTAP S3 implementation is not feature-complete as compared to StorageGRID. We had to move our lakeFS instance from ONTAP S3 based on AFF to StorageGRID."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while NetApp AFF is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell SC Series vs. NetApp AFF report.
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