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.
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is how it simplifies the management of the SAN."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"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 the ease of configuration, the quick setup and the fact that it seems to be hardened. We haven't had any issues with them. In terms of simplicity of ownership, once they're running you don't have to touch them. They're also simple to manage. We came from the VNXe 3200s so it's very similar."
"We've never had an issue with storage."
"We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources."
"The most valuable feature is that the solution is a hybrid system, so you can do both block and file storage."
"Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server."
"Stable flash storage platform with good scalability, efficiency, and speed."
"It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely has a scalable architecture built into that."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"Technical support is good."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"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."
"Areas for improvement would be the financial operations. In the next release, I would like to see a NAS protocol included."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"They could improve the price."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"It would be good to have metrics of the box's performance so we can see what it delivers, but currently, I can't see what it's actually doing."
"I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great."
"I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive."
"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."
"It's an expensive solution, particularly for medium companies. One device costs about 30,000 euros. The support contract is quite expensive as well. We are currently looking for other lower-cost solutions."
"There is an ESRS problem that we're facing where, for some reason, the other Unity has not been able to register to EMC. The support information is not upgrading and nobody can tell me what is wrong with it. It's a minor issue, the ESRS is still working, but it is something that is very confusing and nobody seems to know what to do about it."
"Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed."
"We had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions."
"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."
"The server files are larger than before."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"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."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 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, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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