Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued) vs. Kaminario K2 (discontinued)

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

K2 works well in our mixed-use virtual environment. I would not hesitate to place any workload on K2, it has always performed well. We use fiber-channel connectivity as it replaced our large legacy storage array, replacing one rack of spinning disks with 4U of flash.

Incentivized

• 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

• Great performance
• Great support
• Super-simple to use

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 well known, so third-party support is lacking
• Data reduction is good, but not as good as expected (actual 2.7:1)

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

We performed a bake-off with K2 and one other vendor and they performed identically. K2 pricing was aggressive, performance was great, and it offered the features that we needed at a price that we could afford

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Installing K2 reduced runtime of one of our batch processes, freeing up one employee for other tasks.
• Less time managing storage.

Incentivized