Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued) vs. Reduxio

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

Reduxio fit into our plans for replacing our aging EMC VNX5500. We were able to reduce our data center footprint from 50 rack units down to 8. The data dedupe or "No-Dupe" as they call it was the main reason for the reduced footprint. We also use VSphere and the API's that tie into VCenter work very well. Your able to carve out storage right from the VCenter web client. Reduxio may be less appropriate when used as a backup repository.

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

• High performance.
• Backdating feature.
• Professional services.

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

• Some best practice documentation available online would be nice, however their support is available to answer any questions.
• The available amount of physical storage remaining is sort of ambiguous.
• The marketing of No-Dup is really not a great idea.

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 were looking for a low cost and high IO performance storage option, and considered Netapp and EMC. Reduxio, as an early stage startup, offered us a test option on their beta site. After more than a year, we got a generally available version, and after an additional 3 months, we went to production.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• One positive impact is the amount of electricity we're saving over the VNX5500
• The Reduxio is much simpler to manage allowing less training time.
• The simplicity of the UI will allow us to hire people that may not have as much experience with enterprise storage.

Incentivized