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.
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Dell VMAX
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Dell VMAX All Flash is the latest iteration in the former Symmetrix series of enterprise flash array storage, available in the Dell VMAX 250F edition, or the Dell EMC VMAX 950F edition.
The EMC array is a lot more robust, but the PURE array does almost the same with about a tenth of ease from the configuration. It really depends on the type of backend servers that you need to support as to whether you need a EMC array or a PURE array.
All in all this series great in addressing issues applications that need flash storage as a backend storage supply. It addresses the need for fast, responsive servers that need to boot quickly. It is easy to use and for the most part there are few issues and none that can't be addressed/fixed quickly.
Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash Storage is a very powerful storage that easily manages huge data transactions with high IO processing speed. This Storage is well suited for critical production environments because response times are much better. This storage enables direct data backup. It's always up and running during updates because it creates a redundant connection from the controller.
Dell Compellent support (Co-Pilot) and the add-on service (Optimize) are critical services that Dell Compellent does very well. Alerts from the array are sent to Co-Pilot where tickets are automatically generated and customers are notified of events. Of greater importance at times is the proactive support Co-Pilot and Optimize provide by contacting us of inefficiencies in the array and consulting on resolutions.
Enterprise Manager (Dell's "single pane of glass" management framework) is a useful tool for configuration/evaluation of the array and other Compellent products.
Ease of management. From firmware upgrades to managing server volumes the process is much simpler than with other arrays.
The GUI could be a little more updated with a lot more information regarding usage.
There could be some assistance with high I/O times where snapshots go to consolidate. There seems to be issues when that attempts to occur, and there will times where the virtual machine stuns due to the I/O intensity.
Modification of multiple volumes or the creation of multiple volumes is a pain in the DSM management console.
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.
The best part about this array is that once you have it configured it is pretty much done. There is little to no other configurations to be done other than normal volume adjustments. Support is great as they understand this array very well. The updates are very hands-off and are done solely by support. You contact them and then there are no other changes done on the end-user's side.
We selected Compellent solely based on price. Honestly I would rate it only slightly better than a QNAP we used (which was even cheaper). If performance and reliability are factors in your decision (and they should be) I would recommend looking at something like a VNXe.