Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. StarWind Storage Appliance (SA)

All in all this series great in addressing issues applications that need flash storage as a backend storage supply. It addresses the need for fast, responsive servers that need to boot quickly. It is easy to use and for the most part there are few issues and none that can't be addressed/fixed quickly.

Incentivized

It is well suited in data transfer and storage of files under secure environment. It has contributed to immediate Return on Investment with low cost performance. I totally recommend it to any company for its high speed performance under secure data channels. It does reliable reporting on data integration and analysis on daily basis pointing out areas that have challenging operations.

• Dell Compellent support (Co-Pilot) and the add-on service (Optimize) are critical services that Dell Compellent does very well. Alerts from the array are sent to Co-Pilot where tickets are automatically generated and customers are notified of events. Of greater importance at times is the proactive support Co-Pilot and Optimize provide by contacting us of inefficiencies in the array and consulting on resolutions.
• Enterprise Manager (Dell's "single pane of glass" management framework) is a useful tool for configuration/evaluation of the array and other Compellent products.
• Ease of management. From firmware upgrades to managing server volumes the process is much simpler than with other arrays.

Incentivized

• Very cost-effective. You choose the hardware.
• Very reliable and performant.
• Excellent proactive support. They call us when there is an issue.
• Very flexible. Can mix and match spinning disk and SSD depending on capacity and performance needs.

Incentivized

• The GUI could be a little more updated with a lot more information regarding usage.
• There could be some assistance with high I/O times where snapshots go to consolidate. There seems to be issues when that attempts to occur, and there will times where the virtual machine stuns due to the I/O intensity.
• Modification of multiple volumes or the creation of multiple volumes is a pain in the DSM management console.

Incentivized

• Not sure what improvements are needed. The UI could possibly be more intuitive.

Incentivized

This is not solely based on the support engineers themselves but more so that the logging and gotcha's that their array has. There have been multiple times where logs are pulled, but the folder is not large enough, and it crashes the array. Other times there are certain aspects that support either does not know of or isn't knowledgable about how to look at particular issues that could be causing problems.

Incentivized

We selected Compellent solely based on price. Honestly I would rate it only slightly better than a QNAP we used (which was even cheaper). If performance and reliability are factors in your decision (and they should be) I would recommend looking at something like a VNXe.

Incentivized

I have not been able to work with same featured product in our organization, however the performance of this platform has been excellent. The support center has been reliable and trustworthy giving us 100% support on daily basis when we deach them. It is affordable to any business enterprise that is ready to implement data storage and transfer programs. The maintenance and scalable cost is reasonable and and the services has been great.

• The SC9000 has been able to serve our current and futures needs well enough to not need to upgrade anytime soon.

Incentivized

• It enabled us to upgrade our storage and switch from FC to iSCSI at a reasonable cost.
• iSCSi is so much less expensive to maintain.
• StarWind is upgradable and you never lose your investment.

Incentivized