Dell Compellent (discontinued) vs. SolidFire (discontinued)

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
SolidFire (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
NetApp acquired the scale-out flash storage startup SolidFire in late 2015. The product line was discontinued in October of 2023, and is no longer available from NetApp.N/A
Pricing
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
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)SolidFire (discontinued)
Features
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
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
SolidFire (discontinued)
8.1
Ratings
10% below category average
Flash Array Performance8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Flash Array Integration8.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Data Compression8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Simplicity9.00 Ratings6.40 Ratings
Power Savings9.00 Ratings6.40 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell Compellent (discontinued)SolidFire (discontinued)
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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Well suited for companies who use NetApp Storage. This is one of the more performant offerings from NetApp and is highly customizable.
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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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  • All-flash performance is very good, particularly on read-intensive workloads
  • Performance scales linearly by adding new nodes
  • Guaranteed QOS policies offer both a minimum IOPS and maximum IOPS with burst capabability, so its not just capping the upper limit of a workload
  • Encryption at rest is integrated into the array platform
  • Grid architecture ensures that ability to perform rolling upgrades online without severely impairing performance
  • VVOL capabilities with the array allow granular control and visibility of the workloads
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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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  • There seems to be an overarching view (with drill downs) of the entire infrastructure.
  • You need a solid partner to implement this product initially.
  • As this product is still integrating with Net Apps mature support systems, I still think that there is room for a better end to end experience.
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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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I have not had to use support. However, others on my team have and have been impressed.
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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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All in all, Net App Solid Fire is a strong competitor to Nutanix AOS or HPE SimpliVity. It is conceded that there are plusses and minuses for the competitive landscape, however, Net App Solid Fire is a worthwhile competitor at a very competitive price point.
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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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  • Effectiveness
  • Ease of use
  • Cost savings by tiering
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ScreenShots