We performed a comparison between Dell SC Series and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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's simple, powerful, and ready to use."
"It helps to simplify storage. For most of our customers, when they move to Pure Storage, storage becomes an afterthought."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability."
"They are quite responsive and our local team was pretty good."
"The initial setup was straightforward in the way that it was a database vacuum storage."
"Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations."
"It is all-flash. This makes it a lot faster than the rest of what we have, as it is able to drive high I/O loads, which is big for us."
"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."
"Technical support is very good. I do use it from time to time and it's always excellent."
"It is fast and performs well."
"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."
"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."
"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."
"The solution is stable; we've had no problems at all."
"Performance-wise it's high speed. It's also more stable and scalable."
"Its performance is most valuable. This solution is much faster than other as well as older storage solutions. The performance of the system is very good. We are getting 50 times better experience than the older storages. We are using AFF 300. It also has native cloud integration and most of the features."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The management software is very good."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."
"The speed is the most valuable feature."
"The management of it is very simple. that is the most valuable feature."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"It needs to improve its price."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"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."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"It is not possible to create a cluster on top of multiple arrays."
"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?"
"One option I would like to see is, when you're up on the view-screen, to be able to incorporate getting to what HPE call the iLO, the Integrated Lights-Out. To be able to get that instead of having to go back and trying to find IP addresses and re-institute those would be good. It would be good to be able to that put on the initial splash screen."
"I would like to see higher compression, dedupe, faster I/O, and bigger drives."
"The interface could be improved. It should have an application point of view."
"We have seen some degraded throughput with mixed workloads. We have been working with Dell EMC to correct some of these latency issues."
"Technical support should respond more quickly because the turnaround time is very high."
"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."
"In some customer cases, customers experienced more performance or latency."
"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"This solution has limited storage."
"We need a center related to NetApp in Egypt so that we can deal with them directly."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"This solution does not have any compression or deduplication."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems."
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Dell SC Series is ranked 24th in All-Flash Storage with 49 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell SC Series is rated 8.4, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell SC Series writes "Automated architecture that proactively optimizes your database ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". Dell SC Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor and HPE Nimble Storage, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell SC Series vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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