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 support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"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."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"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."
"I find this version to be more budget-friendly compared to products from other vendors. This aspect greatly benefits my customers. It's highly advantageous due to its affordability. The operational aspect is also noteworthy. Additionally, its availability and performance are commendable. The speaker are also equally powerful."
"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 solution is stable."
"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."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"With federation, you can have multiple systems across sites. You can treat them as one, and with a live migration, volumes don't go down. You can move them from site to site, doing maintenance, and keep your environment up."
"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."
"We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so our customers can share and manage the devices very easily."
"We are happy with the way we have Dell EMC Unity XT configured."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"The most valuable features are its performance and simplicity."
"The performance combined with the gig-per-dollar value is a combination that is superior to other storage options."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have."
"I don't think I've ever seen latencies above 10 milliseconds unless it was something that wasn't the array that was messing up. The thing is rock-solid."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"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."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"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."
"I don't think the solution is very scalable."
"The administration and support (on the way that they delivered) was a little bit slow."
"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."
"The initial setup is somewhat complex and should be made simpler to do."
"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"
"The interface can be a little challenging for someone new."
"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."
"For the integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure, they should integrate the function into the SP controller."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."
"What I'd like to see is a little more detail on the networking side. I can go into where it's showing me the replication, but when I go into the network it just gives me broad-based information. I don't know which replication job is actually feeding it. I have to go in and rely on other apps."
"Software updates have to be downloaded to the root of the device. This pushes the available space to 95% utilization."
"I think Dell EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer."
Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 3 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 29 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Customers are most impressed with the provisioning because you don't need to buy a large amount of storage upfront". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Price / Quality ratio is good and since OE 5.03 code the array family reached a rather good maturity level". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor, HPE Nimble Storage and IBM System Storage DS8000 Series, 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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