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Dell Compellent (discontinued)

Score8 out of 10

32 Reviews and Ratings

What is Dell Compellent (discontinued)?

Since it's acquisition in 2011 Compellent became a Dell product line of storage solutions (e.g. Dell Compellent Storage Center). Compellent products became part of the Dell EMC SC Series of enterprise flash and SAN storage devices and are now EOL.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Dell Compellent (discontinued) has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 32 ratings of Dell Compellent (discontinued)'s features
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Top Performing Features

  • Simplicity

    Flash arrays should be simple to use and require little training

    Category average: 9.2

  • Power Savings

    Flash arrays use significantly less power than hard-disk drives

    Category average: 7.9

  • Flash Array Performance

    Solid state flash arrays offer high speed compared to hard-disk drives

    Category average: 8.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Flash Array Integration

    Integration with hypervisors and applications

    Category average: 9.2

  • Data Compression

    Flash Arrays include compression and deduplication features to reduce storage requirements

    Category average: 7.6

  • Non-Intrusive Upgrades

    Software upgrades are often seamless with no performance tuning required

    Category average: 8.9

Reviews

What users are saying about Dell Compellent (discontinued).
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Dell SC9000 all flash SAN serves up all the data at the Frost Museum of Science

Incentivized
Brooks WeisblatView profile
Vice President of Technology in Information Technology at Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • The speed of the all flash based SC9000 allows us to host all of our servers on one central storage array.
  • Reliability of the SC9000 has been key with 100% uptime over the 2 years we have been using it.
  • The SC9000 has been very easy to maintain and support.

Cons

  • Expensive to support after the initial warranty expires.

Return on Investment

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

Other Software Used

VMware ESXi, PRTG Network Monitor, Veeam Availability Suite

Dell EMC SC Series- GREAT review

Incentivized
Verified User
Director (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Decreases time management
  • Easy to manage
  • Meets all business needs

Cons

  • Works poorly when there are massive issues such as snapshots
  • Modification of multiple volumes or the creation of them
  • Assistance with high I/O times where snapshots are consolidating

Return on Investment

  • Platform independence meaning we are able to scale up and out without downtime
  • Migration occurs automatically at a set time defined by the user; saving time
  • Granular approach optimizes tiering

Flash storage with an outdated management console

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Dell EMC SC Series (Compellent) does work well most of the time, but when there are massive i/o issues such as snapshot consolidation, it seems to function poorly.
  • Dell EMC SC Series (Compellent) is an easy to use array. Simple to configure volumes, add servers, and adjust policies.
  • The updates seem to be easily resolvable, with very little to no issues coming from any problematic update paths.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • This storage array is a middle-range array that brings speed with peace of mind due to the stability.
  • The uptime has helped us with making sure the hosts and servers that connect to this array have as much uptime as possible.
  • The negative still has to be that these arrays can't seem to handle quick/high I/O usage.

Alternatives Considered

Pure Storage FlashArray

Other Software Used

Pure Storage FlashArray

Great Price, performance an reliability are questionable

Incentivized
Jeff StockampView profile
Principal Systems Administrator in Information Technology at Concur (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Very competitively priced
  • No need to manage individual RAID groups
  • Honestly I can only come up with 2 good things.

Cons

  • Reliability. We had several times where VMFS luns would become corrupted and we'd have to move all VM's off to other storage
  • Performance. 1g iSCSI performance was abysmal (although the unit we used was an older device)
  • Management and Monitoring. Both management and monitoring are pretty primitive. We were never able to integrate monitoring into Nagios.

Return on Investment

  • Because cost was minimal it was able to achieve ROI.

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Opsview Enterprise, Amazon Relational Database Service, VMware ESXi, Windows Server, EMC Cellera NS, EMC VNX, Amazon Glacier

Why Compellent is the right SAN for your business needs.

Incentivized
Justin StumpfView profile
IT Manager in Information Technology at CyberCoders (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Block level RAID with data tiered based on how often those blocks are read or written.
  • You can mix and match different ways of accessing the SAN, FC or ISCSI.
  • They offer the ability to mix and match drive speeds and sizes within racks. This provides for larger, slower drives to store old data, while providing fast SSD storage for data that is constantly in use.

Cons

  • I would like to see better options for data replication between sites.

Return on Investment

  • Switching to Compellent more than doubled the database performance of our main business application.