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.
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"The supportability of SCME drives for faster data access from the PowerStore and is the most valuable feature."
"The way you're able to manage all your PowerStores as one solution is very good for us. PowerStore enables you to federate or cluster multiple appliances with automated load balancing. In terms of management, it's helpful that we can do it from a single interface where we're able to manage multiple PowerStores. When you have multiple PowerStores it works intelligently by running the workloads based on the needs of the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of Dell PowerStore is the all-NVMe flash storage. This is the most powerful feature of this series. It supports compression and duplication leads."
"Overall, we're quite happy with the product because we can move the data that is stored on more than 10 of our current storage devices to a single PowerStore."
"Migrations are very easy and fast."
"This solution is very useful to us as we use it internally for all of the services that we need. We use it as a lab and we showcase new technology to the customers and how it can help them going forward."
"The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor."
"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."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain."
"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."
"The most valuable feature is the dynamic cache of this product. It is very important. We have the physical cache and we can boost this cache using disks. All the products are mainly flash now and this is one of the main characteristics which our customers like."
"The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable."
"The setup and installation procedures are easy."
"More demonstration and training options are needed."
"We are looking for the Dell PowerStore to become more mature to maximize our use cases."
"I would like to see a Snapshot feature. Currently, it is unable to occupy the capacity."
"The only area I can highlight for improvement is that the 4:1 data reduction target has not been reached. This may be due to an issue with Dell EMC's initial analysis of data compression. As a result, we have had to add new physical disks to reach our goal of total available disk space."
"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."
"The setup process could be improved. We had some issues regarding configuration and the time it took to do things. It wasn't specifically the people we worked with, but more the process and how it's done. They can work on that."
"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 storage could be improved. I would like a feature for how to best secure an appliance and the storage since we are connecting the container to the public cloud. I would like them to develop another level of security, making it more secure than from what they have now."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"It could be improved in the area of management flexibility. For example, I really need to set read-only access for LUNs, and there's no such option with Unity XT."
"Scalability of this solution could be improved."
"They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 20 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 34 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 "We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device". Dell PowerStore is most compared with Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem, Dell PowerMax NVMe, HPE Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage Arrays vendors.
We monitor all All-Flash Storage Arrays 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.