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."It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"Support has been helpful."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"It's extremely stable and has good performance."
"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."
"I think that Dell EMC is one of the best technical support services in Ukraine."
"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."
"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."
"Easy management of volumes: You can create volumes and easily assign them to VMware clusters, increasing their size."
"It has been one of the most stable products in our data center."
"Connecting it up, you can run it within a few hours."
"The flexibility of this solution has been valuable for our business."
"I would say the consistency with the ONTAP versions and the speed and performance from the flash."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"I like NetApp AFF's deduplication."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"The performance. The flash performance helps move data pretty fast."
"The technical support is fantastic. No one else is like their team. We're happy with them."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"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 credentials on the iSCSI interface are only available to type in with the Chrome browser, and not with the Firefox browser."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"From a performance point of view, it's getting a bit old."
"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."
"The ease of use could be improved. It took me a while to learn it."
"I would like to have 100% functionality through the web app."
"It would be helpful if the solution offered higher performance, at least on the back end."
"There's always room for improvement in the operating code."
"While the scalability is good, there are certain limitations."
"Dell could improve the upgrading process."
"The only downside to NetApp AFF is its price."
"I would like for them to develop the ability to detach the fabric pool. Once you've added it to an aggregate it's there for life and it would be nice to disconnect it if we ever had to."
"For ONTAP, in general, the deduplication ratio and Snapshot limitation are areas that need improvement. There is a global limitation on the number of Snapshots or clones that can be spun off of a particular Snapshot. If those limitations are increased, it might be helpful."
"On the roadmap, NetApp is improving the solution's storage efficiency, compression algorithms to achieve more space savings, and the management interfaces. We are looking forward to these feature additions in the next release."
"I have experienced slow responses several times, if the ticket has only been opened in portal."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"Migrating from a public cloud to on-prem or on-prem to a cloud can be a bit complicated. They have their own solution, but it should be easy to use."
"I would like to see more frequent updates at a faster pace."
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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