Dell Unity XT and Dell PowerMax compete in the high-performance storage system category. Dell PowerMax seems to have the upper hand due to its superior performance capabilities in critical environments.
Features: Dell Unity XT offers unified block and file storage, fully automated storage tiering, and data at rest encryption, ensuring security without compromising performance. It utilizes an intuitive management interface to simplify deployment. Dell PowerMax excels in mission-critical environments, incorporating advanced compression and deduplication for efficient data handling. Its NVMe storage capabilities enhance speed and reliability.
Room for Improvement: Dell Unity XT could improve its deduplication features and enhance integration with cloud storage solutions. Dell PowerMax is noted for its high cost and the complexities of its deployment, with customers expressing a desire for better cloud integration capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell Unity XT is renowned for easy deployment and integration, although customer support varies post-EMC merger. Dell PowerMax is also deployable quickly, appealing to enterprises with robust support, despite its higher costs in support contracts.
Pricing and ROI: Dell Unity XT is competitively priced, providing value for mid-range businesses through bundled features and a straightforward licensing model. Dell PowerMax, while more expensive, is considered a wise investment for large operations because of its high-end performance and comprehensive features.
By opting for the gold subscription every three years, you get a free upgrade to the latest controller release.
If you wait more than seven years to buy another one, you get a return on your investment.
During a DCDR setup and migration from VMAX to Dell PowerMax, what was planned as a two-day downtime was completed in just three to four hours.
The performance metrics or benchmarks I use to measure success with Dell PowerMax include uptime as well as our response times on our platforms, both of which are exactly where we want them to be, which is five nines and as fast as possible.
My client has seen significant ROI since the install, and when you don't go down, that's an ROI in and of itself.
We also had one outage where a controller of one of the products had failed and had to be replaced on-site.
Customers always have their issues resolved promptly.
Pure has good storage.
I would rate Dell PowerMax support as a ten, as I have never had an issue with Dell support as it relates to this product.
Dell support for Dell PowerMax is exceptional, rating a perfect 10 out of 10.
I evaluate Dell's support for PowerMax as very good, especially regarding their response time as well as their willingness to get ahead of issues.
The support team is familiar with the product and is available on-site during support times, which improves our experience.
Dell solutions are backed by excellent service and support.
The technical support sometimes takes three to four days to get hardware to facilities.
It is highly scalable.
It is suitable for both medium-sized and enterprise businesses.
It hasn't broken down anytime in the last six to seven years, despite hurricanes, earthquakes, and power outages.
Scalability is not an issue.
Dell PowerMax is good for enterprises, and it also depends on how much workload you're going to bring in on Dell PowerMax in terms of performance and how many users are going to use the database you're hosting.
Volumes can be defined to grow to any level without impacting overall performance.
Dell Unity XT is quite scalable and can be scaled up to the petabyte level.
For NetApp, we can recommend the FAS 8000 series.
During the eight years, there have been no problems such as hardware failure or stopping.
I would rate the stability of the solution as a ten out of ten.
I would rate the stability of the product at seven out of ten.
These patches can be applied on the fly without requiring software upgrades or system downtime.
I would rate it nine out of ten since there are no required downtimes, even during firmware upgrades.
There has been no downtime with Dell PowerMax; it's been extremely reliable, easy to manage, easy to upgrade, and trustworthy as we've upgraded over the years from one version to another.
I would rate the overall stability of Dell Unity XT an eight out of ten.
We would appreciate a built-in transparent failover in the next release to eliminate the need for a separate metro cluster.
I'm eagerly anticipating the roadmap's promise of introducing multiple controllers, which could significantly boost scalability and resilience.
We mostly rely on long-term releases. We don't need the most up-to-date features, but we need a reliable environment.
Compared to competitors such as NetApp, which integrates with public cloud hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, AWS), Dell PowerMax lacks in this aspect.
Dell can assist by providing plug-and-play integrated templates that allow customers to drag, drop, modify, and connect with any target system for generating snapshots without logging into the storage directly.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very reliable storage and cannot experience downtime.
In the future, if Dell storages include this option, especially for Unity, it would help us target SME or medium enterprises for quicker closures and support the sales team.
I believe if Dell can integrate AI to predict potential failures, especially in hardware like hard disks, that would be very useful for proper maintenance.
The pricing is a bit higher than expected.
While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits.
The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there.
I would give it a nine out of ten in terms of costliness.
The higher cost compared to other vendors is justified by additional features, vendor-managed upgrades, and superior support services.
It is the best choice for large projects in terms of price and features compared to midrange solutions.
The price is starting from $500,000.
It is priced at around or under $50,000.
The cost is not cheap nor expensive.
Commercially, Dell Unity XT is viable and competitively priced.
Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator.
The platform's robust features include excellent sustainability tracking, and a comprehensive dashboard offering insights into IOPS, bandwidth, performance, and virtual activities.
Its data compression feature is the best that we have ever seen.
NVMe provides additional fast cache, similar to random access memory (RAM), which improves overall system performance and read/write experience for users.
Dell PowerMax NVMe is very supportive of our operational growth since we require daily performance from our core banking systems and need to facilitate data movement efficiently.
The key benefits of using Dell PowerMax, quantified in terms of saved hours and saved costs, is having one single platform that provides functionality to all of our internal customers.
It helps with data cost management and is seen as a mid-range product with good performance.
We installed the Flash, which makes our IO operations fast and efficient.
If their growth is not significant, we might suggest mid-level Unity storage like Unity 300.
Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.
Dell PowerMax offers robust performance, reliability, and efficient data handling. It is recognized for its compression, deduplication, and NVMe technology, significantly benefiting data centers with its advanced replication and uptime.
PowerMax is equipped to handle mission-critical applications, providing impressive performance metrics with low latency and high IOPS capacity. Its CloudIQ and Unisphere interfaces enhance manageability, while REST API support simplifies storage management. Users in sectors like healthcare, finance, and telecommunications leverage its capabilities for database management, high-transaction block storage, and disaster recovery. However, opportunities for improving deduplication efficiency, interface complexity, and automation remain.
What are the key features of Dell PowerMax?Industries utilize Dell PowerMax to support diverse environments like VMware, Oracle, and PostgreSQL. It serves multiple sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government, aiding in data storage consolidation, disaster recovery, and high-availability hosting for critical systems and applications.
Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.
Dell EMC Unity XT Features
Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:
Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits
Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.
A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "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." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”
Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”
PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."
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