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

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dell Compellent (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
The NetApp® EF-Series is a family of entry-level and midrange all-flash storage arrays that accelerate organizations' access to data and help derive value from it. These systems offer NVMe flash storage and provide more affordable to extreme IOPS, boasting response times under 100 microseconds and bandwidth up to 44GBps.N/A
Pricing
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Features
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
Dell Compellent (discontinued)
8.3
Ratings
8% below category average
NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
8.9
Ratings
1% below category average
Flash Array Performance8.00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Flash Array Integration8.00 Ratings9.60 Ratings
Data Compression8.00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades8.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Simplicity9.00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Power Savings9.00 Ratings7.90 Ratings
User Ratings
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell Compellent (discontinued)NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays
Likelihood to Recommend
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
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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.
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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.
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  • Good to use for Hyper-V Shared volume
  • Good to use for passthrough DISK
  • Very Good for NFS share
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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.
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  • 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
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Usability
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HW and SW of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy to use, with very good support.
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Support Rating
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.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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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.
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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.
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  • 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
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ScreenShots