We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Dell PowerMax NVMe based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the comparison parameters, Dell Unity XT came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Although the two products have similar pricing, support quality, and ROI, users found Dell PowerMax NVMe more difficult to deploy and with fewer valuable features.
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"There was a dramatic improvement in operating costs just as a result of the environmentals and space, let alone the cost of the unit itself."
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"This solution is very scalable."
"Lone segmentation is simpler and more agile. It's improved the velocity in overall provisioning from project to operation."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"It has dramatically cut down the footprint in our data center and reduced the amount of raw disk capacity that we needed to purchase."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe's tech support is good."
"Key features include performance, replication time, and dedup and compression."
"I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"The SRDF replication piece is probably the best feature. It's useful for maintaining recoverability in the event of a disaster."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like."
"It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage."
"VMware integration makes the life of our engineers easier, as we are almost 100% virtualized and this feature is used on a daily basis."
"It has reduced the latency in application and database reads and writes... All-flash, it's fast. We have the 650 model which is all-flash, upgraded from VNX. It just flies."
"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."
"On a scale from one to 10, I'd probably give EMC customer support an 11. It's been really good. We do have premium support, which means if we have a problem, it gets solved really quickly."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"The file functionality could be better."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"I would like the scalability to improve, as it requires additional footprints."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ."
"There is room for improvement in the replication. It's an important requirement for us."
"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"The NVMe integration could be improved."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"We had some issues recently because of a bug in the system. We were presenting LANs to the Unity array but I think it caused a disruption to the host. EMC did acknowledge it and provided an alternative way to do it."
"Perhaps if they added more 10GB ports to the back of the system, so you have more IOPS out of the box itself to the network, that would help."
"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."
"We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug."
"Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it."
"We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes."
"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."
"I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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I have used all, EMC, and HPE 3Par, VNX, Unity, etc. All are OK. But for long term Flash Storage, I would take a look at Hitachi F Series. Best reliability hands down and they provide non-disruptive migrations, no server downtime, no scheduling with users, etc. NDM makes Hitachi a no brainer.
Many insightful answers already provided.
I would just add the following based on my experience. With so many employees an located in different places, its important for you to list the issues being encountered with the present setup, in addition of the need to upgrade, of course :
- Latency -if being experienced generally or specifically to a location as this may indicate a network issue and this is better solved before the upgrade to new storage in order not to disappoint users
-Type of need : analytics/ Big data, classical operational transactions, archiving - in this case you may go for Tiering ( that is have NVMe as the top Tier and SSD as Tier 2). Users are normally demanding but given the costs in a time of budgetary cuts, better offer them different Tiers with front end ones data residing on the better Tier
- Finally, also make sure you have some well structured storage network as you don't want some big fat slow Database VMs located in one of your data centers impacting on the performance of your leaner VMs provisioned on NVMe.
Hello Robert,
What you need to know is in the world of storage infrastructure all the constructor offers a portfolio group by categories like Entry Level Storage, Midrange Storage, Enterprise storage
PowerMax is an enterprise storage on the DELL EMC portfolio
Enterprise storage is usually used for Mission critical Application where the availability required is 99,9999%. With enterprise storage you can manage approximatively 15Millions of IOPS which are very important when you want to take decision to consolidation storage.
Personally, if you cannot expect to reach Millions of IOPS I recommend to go to DELL EMC Unity XT, otherwise move forward to Power Max
PowerMax offer many features like SLO for categories of Application (Diamond, Gold, Silver)
Diamond latency < 1ms
Gold Latency >1ms
Silver Latency >10ms, <20ms
You have also FastVP to move Hot Data to the fastest TIER storage
Physically PowerMax use a Virtual matrix to interconnect all the Engine which can reach 8 depending of the model
Midrange storage use only two controller and provide you and availability of 99,999%
Unity XT is better than HPE MSA or 3PAR
If you want other informations you can contact me
Does PowerMax have storage virtualization for external storage as part of the package?