"The high performance is very valuable, as well as the enterprise reliability features."
"There's lots of flexibility in how we use the resources while also maintaining a small footprint."
"We have been able to consolidate storage into Pavilion. Pavilions are our only SANs because it is a bring your own disk solution. When new drives come out, we are able to take out half of the drives in the system, put in new drives, move our VMs over to the new drives, take the other drives out, and populate those with new drives. Then, we are suddenly twice as dense as we were before. NVMe flash is only going to get denser and cheaper so we can make use of that every couple of years by just throwing newer disks into it at a fraction of the cost of a new SAN."
"Initial setup is a simple process."
"When I have an issue and need technical support, I reach out to them either through chat or by submitting a service request, and the response is good."
"This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain."
"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."
"On the Data Domain side, the most attractive feature is the compression ratio, which none of the other products in the market are currently able to provide. On the Unity side, what customers mostly like is the availability guarantee."
"Integration is easy with this product."
"It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing."
"The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"I like the speed, and I like the API and how programmable it is."
"This solution is very scalable."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"Processes that used to take 40 minutes to two hours can be completed in five minutes."
"The management features are well organized and they have a very good dashboard."
"At this point, I don't know anything that they could provide in a better way."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"I would like to see the management layer improved."
"In our current configuration, we can only run the line controllers in high availability, active-standby mode, whereas we would like to see active-active implemented."
"The rail system that Pavilion uses to mount up into a standard Dell or APC cabinet extends further back than normal rails, and they cover up the zero PDU slot. So, I don't like the rail system that comes with the device. That is my biggest complaint."
"The interface and configuration could improve."
"It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT."
"I think Dell EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside."
"I have a problem because between the Unity XT and the PowerMax, sometimes we need another product between these two products. There could be better integrated and the capacity of the size could be larger."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection."
"Currently, the protocol SNMP is not implemented. That's a problem, as we follow this protocol and I can't check the integrity of this equipment."
"I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need."
"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."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"Its price needs improvement. Its price is almost double than any other flash storage solution."
"The price should be lower."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"Data reduction is an area that needs improvement. There is a garbage collection service that runs but during that time, system utilization increases."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
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Dell EMC Unity XT is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 19 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 33 reviews. Dell EMC Unity XT is rated 8.8, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Dell EMC Unity XT writes "We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Provides protection against ransomware threats with immutable snapshots, and it is well known for its scalability, ease of use, and non-disruptive upgrades". Dell EMC Unity XT is most compared with Dell EMC PowerStore, NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), HPE Nimble Storage, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and IBM FlashSystem, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), Dell EMC PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our Dell EMC Unity XT vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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