back to article Dell EMC refreshes its entry-level arrays

Dell EMC has refreshed its cheapest storage appliance by giving us the SCv3000, a successor to the SCv2000. The new machine is an entry-level unified SAN, but boasts some pretty impressive specs. There's a six-core Xeon E5-2603v4 at 1.7GHz, either 16 3.5” or 30 2.5” drive bays, two hot-swappable controllers and each machine …

  1. Steve K

    $10k for unit only?

    I presume that $10k is for the unit only and not the Flash drives?

    1. Bangem

      Re: $10k for unit only?

      absolutely.

      I guess that price is just for the chassis the controllers and power supplies.

      That figure probably doesn't include disks, support or the software licenses to enable features like auto-tiering or snapshots.

      Such a shame they changed back to the old model of charging for software features.

      1. Steve K

        Re: $10k for unit only?

        Curses - otherwise I would buy one and strip out the flash drives ;-)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: $10k for unit only?

      $10K starting price includes chassis/controllers and 1TB (raw) spinning drives.

      Obviously as you add more drives, expansion chassis and/or select flash drives it's going to be above $10K

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Come on! Can't you read? This is marketing crap of the worst kind. Please try to have some kind of connection between the head line and the content.

    "1PB raw capacity all in 3U for <$10k" != "and each machine can address a petabyte of raw capacity once you add “expansion enclosures”, Dell EMC talk for disk drawers".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Translation...

      These disk thingies can be used for storing stuff.

      If you have more stuff, add more disk thingies. You will be able to store so many thingies!!!!!!

      More thingies costs more money.

      AC to avoid destroying my budding marketing career....

  3. Flakk

    I used SCv2000 kit at my warm DR site as an less expensive alternative to replicating the SAN gear used in the HQ datacenter. Obviously, it was slower under load, but it met our DR performance requirements. The SCv3000 sounds even better.

  4. sal II

    Being able to address 1PB of raw storage and being able to effectively serve it to the hosts under load are 2 completely different things. I can't imagine a real world scenario where the amount of compute in the SCv3000 will be able to handle actual load associated with that much sotrage

    Still looks like a good option for DR though, where performance won't matter that much

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That entirely depends upon what your load is for that 1PB :) Yeah, I could saturate it, but for general purpose workloads, it's more than sufficient.

      I have multiple customers using the SCv2000 and SC4020 and it's slick. Scales well, comprehensive interface and tools. Customers love it and love Dell's copilot support model.

      I don't say this lightly, but frankly, I've not come across a product on the market today that has this much sophistication at this price point.

      (AC because I scope, recommend and sell multiple storage platforms from different vendors.)

      1. portyman

        Support

        Dell support is bad, had a senior tech guy take out our San during upgrade, then following week another upgrade neary did the same!.. Big message on screen ," warning this will cause system outage, " hey just ignore that, boom all access to San went off,after several are your sure questions... Then same message on next upgrade different array , again " always says that it does not go off". Ok, I want that in an email to cofirm you are saying that the array will not go off. Please go away and check this... Email comes saying array will be fine. Arrange time, message appears on screen saying this upgrade will cause data outage... Are you sure we ask, yes he says, then in the background we hear. " wouldn't click that mate San will go off" we ended the call and cancelled update. We now have gone with different vendor. This was just Jan this year.

    2. Down not across

      Still looks like a good option for DR though, where performance won't matter that much

      ...unless you actually need to fail over to DR.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is Dell or EMC?

    So Dell is refreshing is low end/mid range product line in internal competition to EMC? How does this position against Unity? EMC has no longer VNXe, does it?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is Dell or EMC?

      As I understand it, Unity was the follow-on product set to VNX. VNXe was the lowest-end product in that range and no longer exists. They have a virtual product.

      Both Unity and SC occupy a similar midrange space. Both come in spinning, hybrid or all-flash configurations.

      The SC range also has dedup, compression and federation features. I don't see that on Unity

      SC is block only, with external NAS head options, whereas Unity has native block and file.

      Unity has broader integration points with other EMC portfolio products (eg recoverpoint)

      They both have tiering. SC tiering is highly automated.

      So yeah, they occupy the same market space - kinda - but functionality varies. SC starts at a lower price point, delivers price/performance value, is more efficient with space (due to dedup/compression features, tiering). Unity has broader application quals, greater market share, integration into EMC management toolset, etc.

      (AC because of blah blah blah....)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is Dell or EMC?

        A good overview, also while Unity does have Compression and De-dupe is coming along the road it is for all flash configs only and happens inline.

        SC does de-dupe and compression as a post process but has it today.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is Dell or EMC?

          Since Unity is based on VNXe rather than VNX it can still hit those price points if needed, but what happens to SC once Unity has those missing features ? There's not really enough differentiation left between the two for both to survive long term.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is Dell or EMC?

        Thank you, still doesn't make sense though. Looks like a massive overlap of competing product lines in competing teams.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like