We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Pure Storage FlashBlade 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.
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"We were actually able to do multiple upgrades, including head upgrades and moving between the platforms, M20 and M50, over the years. We have never once lost a ping and have never had an outage due to an OS upgrade or a complete head upgrade."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"Most of the problems that we had in the past with the performance in IOPS have disappeared. It has been a great improvement for our customers' services."
"It's easy to use, and the maintenance upgrades to get free controllers work really well."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"It does efficient work of storing data while still delivering the performance that you would normally expect from a higher priced solution."
"Stable flash storage platform with good scalability, efficiency, and speed."
"User friendly interface"
"It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process."
"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."
"I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it."
"We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready."
"It is great because it can work as a SAN and net storage."
"It is scalable. We can add additional tools if we need to expand it."
"The initial setup is pretty quick."
"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."
"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."
"Using this solution has made our backups more reliable."
"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."
"The solution is able to handle workloads and is easy to use. It allows us to actually manage the boxes in less time."
"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."
"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."
"The initial setup of the product is complex."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"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."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it."
"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."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well. Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves... It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage."
"The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system."
"Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that was deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have."
"Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."
"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."
"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."
"The solution is expensive."
"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."
"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."
"On our dedupe during our initial buy, we were expecting a number a little higher like 4x. However, we are getting about 3.6. While it is close enough, it doesn't quite hit the numbers. So, this has been a challenge."
"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashBlade is rated 8.8. 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 Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell ECS. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
