We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The latency is good."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to provision storage from the CLI, versus having to go in and use the GUI every time. I can just script it out and it will create what I need. That makes it super-easy to manage. Also, for us, it's a set-and-forget. Once we provisioned it out, we haven't had to mess with it."
"The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable."
"VMware integration: Grants both the Storage and Virtual Administrator the ability to create and mount datastores, or even to check how much space each VM is consuming."
"They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working not just for replication but for backups as well."
"It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended."
"The initial setup was very straightforward. Migration was smooth and configuration of the storage was quick and simple. The time needed to put it into production was less than expected, and data migration itself went without a glitch."
"I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs."
"It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"The high availability is very good."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out."
"There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. For example, Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue."
"It would be great if the solution could integrate an NVMe disk."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"The only challenge I've ever had was with a Drive firmware upgrade."
"It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity."
"Having more artificial intelligence tools built into the solution would be a great benefit. This would allow us to see more about the workloads and higher visibility, such as performance degradation."
"Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"It can be very expensive."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and HPE Primera, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
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