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 most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"We're getting good performance, and the compression ratio is also very good in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The most valuable feature is replication."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are management and administration user-friendliness, provisioning, and performance."
"The product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"The solution is very reliable."
"Based on our experience with VMAX, there isn't any hardware failure or something like that in PowerMax. Performance-wise also, everything is fine. We haven't faced any performance issues or any hardware failure. Its performance is great as compared to VMAX. Its I/O per second rate is higher than the old model."
"The best feature is the protection - PowerMax NVMe is volume-based and replicates data, so it's very comfortable for us to use."
"The speed and the compatible interface with IBM are the most valuable features of the PowerMax product."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"It allows us to protect our data using different data centers and replicate bi-directionally between our two main data centers."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"The uptime is the most valuable feature."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."
"I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward."
"You can add volume and it's automatically registered in VMware."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."
"Inline data reduction is pretty impressive."
"The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature."
"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."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Automation could be simplified."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"It was not proactive communication."
"Firmware updates are a bit painful because you have to involve their support, as opposed to having the ability to do it yourself."
"Some of the management features could be simplified and that's probably the main thing they need to address."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds."
"There is also room for improvement in the PowerMax architecture and hardware itself. They should design the PowerMax on the basis of PCIe 4.0. I would like to see the possibility of an NVMe drive that operates on PCIe 4.0 and not PCIe 3.0."
"We have had some trouble with the VMAX-to-PowerMax migration, but the VMAX box will be powered down after the migration. The PowerMax boxes are working fine and we don't have any issues with them."
"Although they call it unified storage where you have SAN and NAS, with a NAS implementation on top of a SAN, the NAS implementation is a little complicated and clumsy. As SAN, as block storage, it is very powerful... If they could provide a very good NAS implementation, it would be better, so that customers don't have to look for other simple solutions for NAS."
"I think management is where PowerMax is weakest. We're still managing it like we managed EMC arrays in the early 2000s. There's a slicker, fancier GUI that does more things, but at the end of the day, you still have to dig into the command line and issue a lot of the same commands that we still were using almost 20 years ago."
"The price could be lower, and we are unhappy with the price."
"Issues with slow responses from the support team."
"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."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"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."
"Scalability of this solution could be improved."
"This product has some scalability issues. Before you can get support, you have to look for the service tag number on your product which could make it difficult to access support."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 21 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 45 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Allows us to define different service levels for storage groups to prioritize our workload at the infrastructure level, and provides remarkable value in terms of compression and deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Price / Quality ratio is good and since OE 5.03 code the array family reached a rather good maturity level". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell XtremIO, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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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.
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?