Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DS Series

Dell Compellent has a decent portfolio of products for varying sizes of business. Their licensing model is suited for those not wanting total a la carte fare, and administration is intuitive as compared to other storage arrays. This combined with Co-Pilot support gives Dell a good presence in a vast number of scenarios where networked storage is required over a DAS solution. It's only fallback is its own NAS solution, which itself may be better suited to smaller environments

Incentivized

It works very well for essential data storage such as security footage. It is well suited for remote office storage, but not so much as large database storage.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• They are very easy to maintain and repair.
• The raid and storage speeds are excellent.
• They offer many ways to use the system as a standalone or in a cluster.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There are a lot of xclarity tools that need to be condensed.
• I would like to see the old IMM interface return as the new management interface is not as easy to use.
• Replacing some of the internal components is more involved than it used to be.

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

I have used Dell EMC Unity XT and I will say that the SC Series is better in the areas of the scalability is excellent. If I need more space, it's a no downtime solution. It's harder to get the funding than it is to get the solution itself. In addition, I like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources.

Incentivized

I much prefer the old x systems as I have worked with them for a while. The ds series is much faster and more reliable. Servicing it is simple but some internal components require more involvement.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has generated a lot of revenue in our service department.
• It has made us invest more in learning all of the new systems with xclarity etc.

Incentivized