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.
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"One of the lesser sung advantages was when we started running our interface engine on Pure Storage. The ability to process messages and pass them through in our organization skyrocketed purely because of a disk that I owned which we were getting out of Pure Storage."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The solution is very reliable."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"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."
"Uptime by far is the most important thing, and also the replication ability (SRDF). Most of the customers who need this type of availability also want the protection of multiple data centers, and it is able to easily switchover workloads to their other data centers."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"You can use PowerMax for all workloads and consolidation. We have used it to scale thousands of VMs."
"I have been highly satisfied with the resiliency and scalability of the solution."
"PowerMax is a compact high-performance appliance. It is one of the best devices in terms of performance specs. It includes an NVMe All-Flash Array."
"We can consistently replicate mainframe and open system and have a single recovery point."
"The compression and deduplication are the most valuable features because of the cost savings."
"We're consolidating two to three arrays down to one which means that our data center footprint has decreased by like 90%. So we're saving 90% of our space, and it also is much better on power and everything else in our data center. And on top of that, the performance is much, much better than our older arrays."
"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."
"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 a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads."
"It’s helped with the overall stability of our VMware environment."
"Key features are ease of use, ease of management, ease of deployment, and the GUI is very user-friendly."
"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."
"It has helped us be able to use less administrators per device or system. Therefore,we are more streamlined."
"The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I think replication is one area that still needs improvement. Earlier, Pure Storage FlashArray only had IP-based replication. There was no API-based replication, but they have enhanced the feature now. However, they need to work on API replication for C-type of arrays."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"I would also like to see a real-time, graphical view of metrics. I don't know how far back in time we can look, but if we could see the performance from two months or three months back, and how it is performing now, that would be helpful."
"Remove the need for physical or hardwired virtual servers to run consistency groups, instead make the expensive array controllers handle that."
"There are definitely some improvements that can be made to the CloudIQ."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"The price cap of Dell PowerMax NVMe is very high."
"I would like them to continue improving the management tools and continue moving towards a RESTful API versus CLI."
"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"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."
"The initial installation is straightforward and took approximately one hour. However, the full process was not as simple as IBM."
"The support team is well-versed in the AMG solution, having received comprehensive training. They also boast strong partnerships in both VNAM and Korea. The system's user-friendliness is a primary consideration in their choice of solution, emphasizing the importance of service. They place a strong emphasis on service, occasionally requiring approvals. However, with full installations, they have achieved almost uniformity. Their storage approach differs from a consolidated business-based model; instead, it is application-centric. Their investment in solutions is geared towards specific needs, such as the banking or information system, acquiring smaller storage units individually."
"The interface can be a little challenging for someone new."
"The interface and configuration could improve."
"Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out."
"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."
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?