Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued)

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

This is all about the selling you a "Device" and prices vary greatly between resellers. The devices work well, but the pure cloud solutions need a lot of work.

• 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

• Standard File Backup

• 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

• SQL Backups just don't work reliably. For us, we lost all of our SQL data backed up through the CTERA Application process. Although the logs indicated a success, that was really not the case. This came close to putting us out of business. Luckily I had taken a genuine SQL backup to a folder. Unfortunately it was a month old. We had to pick-up the pieces from there.
• Don't use it for file sync and share. There are better products out there i.e. anchorworks.com
• Support sucks. Good luck with response time and answers that are inconsistent between team members. For example I had to rebuild a VM from scratch. When I re-installed the CTERA client It obviously thought I was adding another device. When I inquired to tech support, one member said "copy the old Data folder" (I still had the old VHD. That did not work). The other directed me to the correct spot to just change the associated folder. The turn-around time was over 24 hours for this simple fix.
• Documentation, plenty of fodder but no real tech there.

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

Unfortunately CTERA does not stack up well if you want a pure cloud BDR. I have use iDrive and Asigra. iDrive has similar support and SQL backup issues. Asigra can vary widely in support and price, but the software is solid.

• 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

• NONE, it about put us out of business