Dell SC Series / Compellent (discontinued) vs. Scale Computing Platform

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

I would recommend it to anyone who has three or more servers. We just received another quote as I am about to deploy Scale at City Hall as well. This will replace my 8-year-old VMware cluster that hosts 20 servers.

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

• Snapshots are lean and fast, so restore time is simply amazing. When you don't have time to wait after a crypto attack to restore, I have found nothing faster!
• Clients can never fully know their growth for years to come, and sometimes it is only a year after the original install. This is no problem we can build on to the system like Lego blocks. Just simply adding a node or two and there is no downtime!
• There are many functions that can be done while servers are running that help to maintain the most uptime, as an example disk size on the primary disk can be expanded without shutting down the server.

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 exposes no backup API. You have to treat VMs as physical machines, with all the drawbacks. This is a huge problem, since the official partner Acronis can't deliver. If you ever worked with Veeam you want it back very very badly.
• Assigned RAM is used RAM. The hypervisor can't share memory or only allocate what is used etc. It's wasted RAM most of the time.
• No logging and auditing. (There is, but not visible to the customer).
• The GUI is quite bad. It looks like done by a designer instead of an IT expert. But it's improving constantly.
• The company relies heavily on KVM, but seems to have no developer in the open source community. This leads to answers like "we can't do anything about QEMU drivers". Yes, you can. Have delevopers working on it.
• You can't do basic things like list all of your VMs and see how much RAM/disk, etc. they are using (e.g. in a list view).
• No rules on which VMs start on which nodes, which VMs to prioritize, etc.

Incentivized

Since I have had no issues with downtime; easier management of my cluster and the ability to lower the number of devices in my Infrastructure, I will gladly renew my support contract with Scale Computing HC3 and upgrade my equipment with them when it comes time for it.

Incentivized

Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.

Incentivized

Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.

Incentivized

Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.

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

The support team deserves major props for how cordial and professional they were with our implementation. We were assigned a project manager and engineer. Everything was scheduled with our kick-off call, and our engineer got us up and running in no time.

Incentivized

I did not do in-person training.

Incentivized

Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.

Incentivized

The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.

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

At the end of the day, and in the environment we are in, Scale just fits the bill, both price-wise and functionality-wise. Upgrading our VM environment was always a week-long process, now, it is a twenty-minute process, implementing, converting VMs, and rolling everything over to Scale was completed in less than a week's time, and that included training.

Incentivized

HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 0% downtime or loss of revenue due to downtime.
• The simplicity of testing backups in a live environment in the event of a technical catastrophe.
• Ease of mind and a lot less stress worrying about a raid system within a standalone server dying in the middle of the night.

Incentivized