Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays

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

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays should be used for critical system backups, databases, for critical applications due to different write allocation algorithms. These systems have faster underlying SSD drives comparing to older types, so in result, Inline data de-duplication in these systems are not noticeable. The idea for these types is valuable for MetroCluster configuration within switchover, in terms of disaster recovery. Performance and response time of EF-series are really exceptional, but comparing to the costs this the rpice for it.

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

• Good to use for Hyper-V Shared volume
• Good to use for passthrough DISK
• Very Good for NFS share

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

• NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays basically provides high bandwidth that's basically used for high end application , but still there are lot of application needs to be run on low/medium bandwidth , for that , there some low/medium IOP's disk need be integrated in storage.
• NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are accessed NetApp SANtricity Web Services Proxy. which is separate tool or agent , its better we can access the GUI vi browser without any tool or agent.
• NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays, need to perform additional configurations for multipathing that's not required in other storage

Incentivized

HW and SW of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy to use, with very good support.

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

NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays provide high IOP's , data protection and other features which makes this storage different from other storage in the enterprise segment , I also worked on IBM DS8K storage and IBM flash storage , But If i compare both of them on basis of performance and feature , I feel Netapp EF series is far better in this segment , I highly recommend Netapp EF series storage , where we required highly IOPS and bandwidth.

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

• Positive Impact on Business where application and database need high IOP's ,data processing speed.
• Its well designed for high end application and database
• Its not well suited for small mid-rang organization because of price.
• Stability and reliability

Incentivized