Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued) vs. EMC VNX (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

• EMC VNX is suited for VMware environment as it integrates with vCenter.
• Integrates well with SolarWinds storage monitoring software.
• It is well suited for enterprise-level organizations with 100+ servers.
• It is not suited for small businesses as it requires specialized administrators and has relatively high license cost.
• It is not suited for businesses that host most of their servers on the cloud.

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

• VNX has had very solid uptime. Over the course of the last 5 years, we have had very little if any downtime.
• We have also used it for our home directories, and with the data dedupe on the file side it has saved us a lot of space.
• Adding additional drive space has also been really easy.

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

• It occupies a large floor space in the data center.
• Unisphere management interface uses Java, which is problematic to run.

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

• Dell EMC Unity is the improved version of EMC VNX. It has all the features in VNX with better performance.
• NetApp all flash is faster and more expensive. It performs better with Citrix systems and VDI solutions.
• HP MSA storage system is less performant and less expensive. It works better for file and CCTV data storage.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• I think it has provided improved reliability and performance [compared to] our previous solutions.
• The lack of performance metrics has led us to need a 3rd party tool that integrates into our Vsphere environment to give us feed back on performance.

Incentivized