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."The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"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 just as stable as any other high-end solution."
"What is most valuable about the Dell EMC SC Series system was its reliability."
"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."
"It is easy to use, expand the hard drives, add storage, and set up replication."
"This solution is easy to use."
"We replicate between SAN to SAN for a lot of features and supportability. It also helps us when we want to upgrade to a newer SC Series or move the data from one data center to another."
"Most valuable features have been the system customization with it, the performance you receive, and their CoPilot Support (or Dell EMC Storage Support)."
"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."
"Setting up storage for an application (storage provisioning) is quick and easy. Maybe a quarter of the time is now spent getting the application up and running, or even less."
"ActiveIQ is the most valuable feature. It's a central point for me to be able to kick into everything every day. I log in first thing and make sure there are no issues, and it helps me with my day-to-day."
"The ease of use for setting up our basic shares such as NFS and CIFS is valuable. It takes a couple of clicks to set up things like object shares."
"The most valuable feature of AFF is that it offers better visibility and control over performance, ensuring it meets customer needs effectively."
"The Snapshots and just the overall flexibility of the product have been great."
"The speed, inline deduplication, and compression are really nice. It's also just easy to manage. We use Snapshot and SnapMirror offsite, which give us some good recovery options."
"This solution has reduced our data center costs because when we went from the 8000 and 3200 series that took us from 20 racks of storage down to two."
"My favorite part is all-flash solid drives. All of my applications are running on an all-flash array. Before, we used to get too many severity tickets on performance, but as soon as we migrated everything to an all-flash array, our critical applications are at top performance."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"It is on the expensive side."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"We need better data deduplication."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The price could be improved."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"Compellent comes in the form of a component that's not true of a unified storage platform."
"The lack of reporting would be the main issue."
"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?"
"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 cost of the solution could be better."
"This product should be a lot more user-friendly."
"You have a limit in terms of how much you can expand storage. It sounds like a lot. However, over the years, as you grow, it may be smaller than you think."
"On the fiber channel side, there is a limit of sixteen terabytes on each line, and we would like to see this raised because we are having to use some other products."
"The total cost of ownership has increased a little."
"AFF could introduce different subscriptions on the platform."
"There are no RDMA capabilities in CIFS (SMB) and NFS protocols."
"I don't like the newest GUI. It needs more options. Some features have been removed. Oversight is not as good in the new GUI compared to the previous version. Though, it might be something that we just need to get used to."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"Cleaning up false positives on alerts. We get a lot of those."
Dell SC Series is ranked 25th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 281 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 HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN. See our Dell SC Series vs. NetApp AFF report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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