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."The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"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."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The latency is good."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"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."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"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."
"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."
"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"The Dell support is helpful and the response is quick. The agents' knowledge is very good."
"The process of reallocating data from fast disks (SSD or SAS) to slow disks (SATA) gives you better performance and better use of resources."
"It's very scalable, especially with federation. If you outgrow the number of spindles that a unit can support, depending on the model, you can go into federation."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"It is lightning fast, low on power and heat, and has a small footprint with great performance."
"For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed."
"We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good."
"We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources."
"It has reduced complexity."
"I like that the performance is very good."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"It is on the expensive side."
"The software layer has to improve."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"What I understand is that this is a 13 year old architecture, so it has lived its life and they're phasing it out. Honestly, we were initially struggling with the integration with VMware (but it was fixed with the VMware 6.5) and, then, it was around a 10GB network. At that time, it had the longevity to go to 100GB as well. It got us thinking about, when we go into the containerized architecture, what do we need to do to fix the infrastructure?"
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"We can definitely see a need for it being a multi-controller system for customers who want to scale beyond the current capability. That's always a downside. A lot of the new systems are scaling vertically, they scale out, and the Compellent, of course, is controllers with shelves under it, so you don't scale out with it, unless you add another one. But if you do, they don't talk to each other, like some of the other solutions that we sell."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"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."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"Licensing, especially on the storage line, could use some simplification. It's not terrible, but, for example, with the Isilon series, they've gone to completely a la carte. A la carte is very difficult to traverse, as to what you need. It would be more beneficial, at least from my point of view as a customer, if they did it more like car companies do, where there are package lines"
"On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domain - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily."
"The user interface could use improvement."
"We have only used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvements suggestions yet."
"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."
"Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great."
"Currently, the protocol SNMP is not implemented. That's a problem, as we follow this protocol and I can't check the integrity of this equipment."
"If you compare it with VMAX, where we communicate with the box through Solutions Enabler and there are a lot of commands and a lot of flexibility, the command line for Unity needs to enhanced."
"It is expensive, and the pricing could be better."
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 189 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 Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Dell SC Series vs. Dell Unity XT report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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