We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"The scalability is good."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"The initial setup was really straight forward."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"We've been using FlashArray's snapshot for backups. Their replication across sites and response time are also excellent."
"It gives us capacity planning."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The solution allows for easy, useful replication with good features for VPLEX and VIVO."
"All-flash performance, Snapshotting capabilities and replication are all valuable features."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it."
"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."
"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."
"The solution is so easy to manage that I forget it is there."
"The replication and mirroring features are very good."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"Rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."
"The hardware and software of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy for us to use."
"Having the option of such high-speed storage in the data center is what makes it valuable."
"The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our data bases."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"Automation could be simplified."
"The setup needs to be improved the most. They can do a little more with the user interface, but the setup is what I would like to see made a bit easier."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"It goes at about 95 percent, so we have had some performance issues. It is hard to clear them."
"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"Include cloud-based replication for blocks"
"There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"Last (and I understand that it has a low chance of being implemented) the copy services currently are redirect on write. It would be great if the administrator could choose between redirect on write and copy on write, when configuring copy job."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"It was difficult to implement and lacks some additional features that would be useful, but as a solution fits a particular need for our organization."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."
"The management interface, while very reliable, it seems a little old now and could maybe use a little modernization."
"A little more manageability, a simpler management interface. It's not necessarily that it's way overly complex. It's just that it's not as easy as the FAS series."
More NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays Pricing and Cost Advice →
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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