We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC Unity XT based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two products received similar reviews in most categories. According to reviews, Dell EMC PowerStore appears to be a bit more robust and therefore more appropriate for larger environments.
"I like some basic features like Snapshot, FlexClone, and advanced features such as SnapMirror, and SnapVault. They also recently enhanced the market with Cloud Volumes ONTAP. I think that NetApp is a very good product."
"Snapshots, snap clones, backups, flexibility, and agility are valuable features. I like that NetApp AFF is easy to use. We can automate everything for our backups and use cases. It's fast and simple, and provides storage to all of our VMware ESX hosts. It expands easily as well."
"The most valuable features are the performance and the storage efficiency, due to the compression and deduplication... The efficiency is very important because we can buy fewer disks for more data."
"Regarding features, SnapMirror is one we depend on right now. It helps us provide snapshots to the customers on request. There are many scenarios in which we might take snapshots in various daily use cases. We trigger the snapshots, which gives us a sense of security because we know we have this technology in place if something happens."
"The NVMe flash cache is the most useful feature. It lowers transactional speed even more."
"In terms of the footprint, it is far more efficient. It has smaller, higher-capacity drives than our older unit. In terms of space, power, and cooling, it has simplified things."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"NetApp AFF has helped to simplify our clients' infrastructure while still getting very high performance for their business-critical applications. One of our customers uses the vSAN environment in the release, then they use NFS for their VMware VCF environment and TKG environment. In this case, when they move to NetApp for the TKG and the VM infrastructures, they use AFF for block, CIFS, and NFS. It provides a single storage with NFS, block, and CIFS with deduplication, team provisioning, and compression. Everything is in there, which makes it very good to use."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"Pricing is very good. It's very competitive against those of all the others that I looked at in the marketplace, such as Hitachi, IBM, HP, and Pure. Dell is right there in the mix as far as providing the best price point as well as meeting the performance requirements that we have."
"The most valuable feature is that it is easy to use this frame. I am a SAN administrator, but I was able to train my colleague, who had only been a VMware administrator, on the PowerStore in about half a day. Now he's autonomous in assigning volumes and creating data stores..."
"When compared to Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore's cost was quite attractive."
"I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price."
"You can add compute and capacity independently. We have sized the solution based on our current needs, but in the future we can choose to increase capacity if we grow our activity in the market. And if we have more business in our monetary system, we can increase compute. The ability to choose what we increase is a good feature."
"Dell EMC PowerStore is scalable."
"The solution overall has high performance."
"Initial setup is a simple process."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."
"You can add volume and it's automatically registered in VMware."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is the GUI, it is very good. End users can manage using it. Additionally, the documentation is of high quality and it integrates well."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"Dell EMC Unity XT has good integration with VMware."
"In the past, NetApp designed it so that you have a 70% threshold. You would never fill up past 70% since you need to have that room available. Whereas with Pure, I can fill it up to 110% of what they listed and it's still going at full speed. NetApp can't do that."
"The size of NetApp could be better. They're always about 40 pounds without the hard drives in them, so it would be great if there's a way to make them smaller yet keep the functionality. That would reduce the physical footprint."
"There is room for improvement in terms of support. I have noticed that if I sometimes call their customer care for a particular issue, they will give me another number and ask me to call that other team. It would be better if they could do a warm transfer. That would save customers time from calling all the numbers again and speaking to another team."
"It can get a little expensive if you need to add more disks. The cost is a pain point for us, especially in terms of expansion."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. There are a few things that cannot be done in the GUI. We do a lot of things through the CLI, but that's grown out of a lack of ability to do them in the GUI. An example is QTrees. You can manage them within the GUI, but the GUI is missing a few options."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"We would like to have a feature that automatically moves volumes between aggregates, based on the performance. We normally need to do this manually."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"Many customers are looking for a cyber recovery feature included in PowerStore. We would like to see this added in a future release."
"The NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap."
"The cost of technical support is high."
"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."
"Reporting is an area that could be improved. It's very simplistic sometimes, and some of the very technical guys on my team want to see more of the details and be able to massage the report a little bit better."
"We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases."
"The pricing could be lower. It is very expensive."
"I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers."
"It would be better if there were more integrations."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."
"It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"One area of improvement is replication. We are also using Oracle virtual machines, and when you are using systems from other vendors, the process of replicating from Unity through OLVM is more laborious than when we were using VPLEX."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 44 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "Saves us power and floor space, and we can quickly assign new data stores for our developers' VMs". 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 PowerStore is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, Dell PowerMax NVMe, HPE Nimble Storage and HPE Primera, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, Dell PowerMax NVMe and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT 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.
Dell EMC PowerStore is a unified storage platform that has the added benefit of being scalable. The automated management of resources feature provides a more simple administration.
I found the flexibility, performance, and ease of use very helpful. We were looking for a solution that has good compression and we found it in PowerStore. Also, the load balancing is automated so you can cluster more appliances without worrying about the load balance.
It has a central interface, which makes it very user-friendly. The machine learning capabilities even give you recommendations to optimize administration, so for me, it is a winner.
That being said, there is a learning curve involved for setup, and the process is quite long. It would also be nice to have more enterprise features such as replication on other sites. For organizations using VMWare, it is difficult to integrate with PowerStore.
Dell EMC Unity XT is an All-Flash storage array solution that optimizes SSD performance. The goal of the solution is to streamline resource management from and to the cloud.
With this product, small businesses that cannot afford other enterprise flash storage offerings can have enterprise-level flash storage that is cost-effective. It makes it easy to manage storage and scale up by provisioning new workloads. I like it is easy to integrate with other products.
Still, Dell EMC Unity XT lacks some useful features like flexible raid volumes. It is also difficult to integrate it with enterprise backup solutions. We would like to use it, but the SNMP protocol is not supported. Tech support needs to improve their response time, too.
Conclusions
Overall, the Dell EMC PowerStore is a more complete solution if you are looking for automation and scalability. While the EMC Unity is easier to integrate, the PowerStore’s machine learning and central interface are better advantages.
I agree with Leah... There are a bit more features/options with PowerStore, but the networking setup much more complex (too much if you ask me).
Currently, there's no support for replicated NAS, so that's a big issue within our environment.
The scale-out feature is nice, but there's a lot of limitations, i.e. data isn't spread across all of the available 'appliances' in a big pool. Volumes are isolated to a single 'appliance' and can be migrated to another appliance if one becomes full or to balance the system out.
All in all, the product is still a bit too new and DELL needs some time to bake the product before I can fully endorse it.
For those reasons, we recently deployed Unity. It's much simpler to deploy & support (especially with NAS).
If you remove NAS from the equation, then it's fine for Tier2 workloads, but to be honest, PowerStore has a ways to go before it gets my vote.
Unity XT was released in April 2019, so it's about 2.5 years old at this point, and as you can imagine, mid-tier storage technology has changed significantly in the past 2.5 years.
PowerStore 2.0 supports end-to-end NVMe-FC protocol which is super-important if you're running an all-NVMe or all-SCM configuration on any array (not just Dell / EMC). Unity XT only supports legacy FC or iSCSI transport, both of which use legacy SCSI logic which was released back in the 1980's and was never intended for use with NVMe or SCM drives which use massive parallelism.
Also, there are no persistent NVMe or SCM drive options for Unity XT... only old-school 12Gb SAS SSDs and classic spinning disks.
Also, fiber transport speed on Unity XT is capped at 16Gb/s where PowerStore uses 32Gb/s currently.
PowerStore also has tons more compute and memory, which is necessary to run >1M IOPS. For example, the biggest Unity XT array (880) uses only 64 cores and 768GB of memory, where the biggest PowerStore (9000) uses 112 cores and 2560GB of memory.
Since the cost per TB is nearly identical between Unity XT and PowerStore, I believe the business cases to choose Unity XT over PowerStore are pretty limited at this point.
The common denominator is that both are storages but so far Unity is hybrid storage while PowerStore is only NVMe with excellent performance and response time.
Unity is a monolithic system, while PowerStore is a container-based design for faster innovation.
Unity has a classic RAID configuration while the PowerStore uses the unique DRE technology with coverage up to dual parity.
Unity operates on its own while the PowerStore can operate on a cluster with up to 8 active-active nodes and the unique feature of the global cache in the cluster.
Logical protection within the PowerStore as well as for the asynchronous replication is based on snaps that are immutable and cannot be modified or manipulated, it is the perfect tool for recovering instantly from ransomware scenarios! The synchronous replication of PowerStore is based on Metro Node, an active-active HW solution based on VPLEX, is independent, does not burden the PowerStore and offers 0 RPO 0 RTO and 0 DTO providing virtual volumes of up to 64TB!
The integration with VMware is unique, the PowerStore model X can natively support VMs and applications in a 2U appliance, loads could be transferred to the VMware ecosystem with a simple vmotion. This game-changing capability, known as AppsON, is ideal for data-intensive workloads in core or edge locations where infrastructure simplicity and density is required, as well as for “infrastructure applications” such as anti-virus or monitoring software.
Notable are the automation for load balancing in the cluster, the ability of programming with Ansible and the ability to connect with the hosts with NVMe over FC fabric or TCP using even the existing infrastructure if compatible.
Conclusion:
PowerStore is a new and innovative product with features that make it stand out.