Does any one have experience with the Dell SCv3020 units?

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lostmind

Member
Jan 5, 2013
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We run a bunch of simple kvm VM's on hypervisors with direct attached SSD's simple linux mdraid. Performance has obviously been amazing, but we worry about drive failures causing large outages and the lack of flexibility to simply migrate VM's across hypervisors is a bit of a pain point.

10gb sfp+ network.

Thinking simple iscsi or maybe nfs (would have to test out performance).

~20tb storage needed (currently at 12tb but want some room for growth).

We are currently an all supermicro shop and dell is trying really hard to win all our business. And then I let slip that I have been investigating a truenas system and they've launched the attack on me to get me on "all dell". The only real benefit to dell I can see is their financing is easy and decent.

I've been trying to find any good reviews of the scv3020 but so far have only found a couple of blog posts that are somewhat less than favorable... but no thorough testing or benchmarking seems to be out there. Except stuff from dell, which I obviously don't trust much.


Does anyone here have hands on experience with these? Are they even close to what dell claims?

Thanks!
 

cheezehead

Active Member
Sep 23, 2012
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Midwest, US
Have an SCv2020 at one site connected via SAS to the hosts. It works for the most part, dual controllers (active/passive) so the vmware hosts don't care when we patch it. With recent code there is an HTML5 interface for handling pretty much everything. Raid sets you can re-stripe on the fly...ZFS can't do that. If looking at the tiering with it's all post process so if using it don't overrun the flash tier before it has time to destage (performance will tank). On the support-side it's be decent native speaking support personal (TX or MN) for the two times i've needed to call in.

As far as Dell vs Supermicro, I do like iDrac (ent) better than the IPMI on SM. Openmanage Enterprise makes firmware updates in mass easy. That being said, Supermicro has a wider hardware library to select from and pricing for most i've heard is cheaper.

In any case, get pricing from both and see where it falls.
 
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lostmind

Member
Jan 5, 2013
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Cheezehead, appreciate the feedback!

I haven't used Dell in 10 years, due to a bad experience with "4 hour support". But I'm always willing to give second chances.

For me, my biggest concerns are cost and performance. Small company, tight margins, many clients (over 300 little vm's) with high expectations. :)

Still trying to price it all out, but the dell pricing is not bad. It's more, but not terribly much more. But I am just not sure that the performance will be where we expect.
 

cadamwil

Member
Jan 16, 2014
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Nashville, TN
This is way later, but we use a SCv3020 flash and plattered setup with SAS as our transport. We have had good performance. We came from an Equallogic 7200RPM NLSAS 1GB iSCSI SAN. The performance has been night and day and so far the SCv3020 has been reliable. Although I think have only updated the controllers once. Although ours is in a VMware vSphere setup.