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 product cheaper compared to other solutions concerning the technology that they are using."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"Simplicity and reliability are the most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."
"I like FlashArray's ActiveCluster as well as its snapshot and cloning capabilities."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"The scalability is good."
"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."
"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."
"I find all of the Dell PowerStore features to be valuable."
"I have found the most valuable part of Dell PowerStore is the price."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"The support is very good."
"This solution is highly flexible and offers efficient online compression capabilities."
"The solution is extremely stable."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter."
"I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it."
"I have found Dell EMC Unity XT to be stable."
"The most valuable features are its performance and simplicity."
"We particularly like the user interface on cloud IQ with this product."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"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."
"The product has helpful local technical support."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"Pure Storage support could be a little better."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"It needs more mature code."
"PowerStore's management console could be improved."
"The cost of technical support is high."
"Horizontal scaling has room for improvement."
"I do not like having to use VPLEX for synchronous replication, as opposed to having the store software built-in."
"During the installation phase, the licensing part was not straightforward. It was very difficult for the technicians, who are not trained Dell EMC technicians, to do the licensing because the information on their website is not straightforward... Eventually, I had to pass this task to our business partner and they did it for us."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down."
"The interface and configuration could improve."
"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."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"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."
"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."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 35 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 48 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.4, 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 IBM FlashSystem, Dell PowerMax NVMe, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage and HPE Primera, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, IBM FlashSystem and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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Hello Yasin,
The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
The Unity 400 is a rather old, a much less powerfull solution and at its best holds ssd flashdrives if at all. Currently you have the Unity 8xx model, which has more CPU punch and therefore maxes out less fast on CPU utilisation. What this means is that you can add more shelves and disks and workloads to it before you hit the roof.
The powerstore 1200 is an nvme storage, is 60% more powerfull (compared to FC/SCSI-SSD on Unity) in our case, and has higher datareduction rates. If the unity reaches out to a datareduction rate of 1.5 or 2, the Powerstore T1200 is capable of 3 to 3.5 datareduction, probably due to half its blocksize. The price of the device is pretty much dependant on the price of its media, and therefore the Powerstore T1200 is the absolute winner.
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Another aspect is that the Powerstore can be used to build a cluster of arrays compared to the sync/asynch replication only feature of the Unity series, rendering the mirrored volumes unuseable unless one fails over to it, like in a disaster recovery scenario.
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The Powerstore also allows true A/A volumes on both sides . What this means is that one can build stretched vSphere clusters and the loss of your array in one site will still allow writing to the alternate protected disk, transparently ! You can have site local writes to your volumes and remain in sync without a need to cross site write.
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There is not much of a reason to settle for the Unity anymore, though some still prefer the Unity for NAS compared to Powerstore, but honestly speaking I won't recommend to use any of both for that purpose unless for limitted useage. Unity allocates RAM ressources dynamically when used for FC/SCSI AND NAS , whereas the Powerstore is initialized in a kind of split off of RAM ressources between NAS/FC SCSI at installation time. The ressource allocation is fixed and can't be altered lateron. Thats a hard call. So I'd favour the Unity only if you use it for low/moderate NAS needs in combination with FC/SCSI or block data and you don't have the budget nor the size to use a NAS optimised array on top.