We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE 3PAR StoreServ based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Technical support has been okay."
"This solution helps accelerate demanding enterprise applications. VMware workloads, the database, and Oracle Solaris are hosted on AFF, which means that our primary priority workloads are on AFF and that the secondary ones are on FAS. That includes the SAN national cloud."
"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."
"It also helps to accelerate databases in our environment. First of all, there is the reliability of things staying online and the small response time as well, from the MetroCluster, for all of the data that we're serving; and the applications are talking to the MetroCluster. It provides a very fast response time."
"The speed of data retrieval is the most valuable feature. We mostly use it for our SAP database and we are getting good IO from the hard drive."
"It simplifies data management for NAS environments with its ease of management, ease of share creation, and Active IQ feature. These features are good overall. It helps us manage data quickly and sufficiently. Also, compression features, like dedupe, give us a good ratio."
"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."
"It impacts customer retention because of its overall ease. When you are running a business, where time is a factor, that is the biggest selling point. Things happen really rapidly, when they happen, and being able to say, "Yeah, we can get this up and running in a day, if you want," or even less time in some cases. Sometimes, that can be what makes or breaks our case."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"Inline data reduction is pretty impressive."
"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."
"We've never had an issue with storage."
"You can add volume and it's automatically registered in VMware."
"The solution overall has high performance."
"I have found Dell EMC Unity XT to be stable."
"There's a lot of good features. HPE 3PAR StoreServ is similar to Dell EMC. It is a high-speed system with automatic failover/failback, integrated with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware. These are the main reason for choosing HPE 3PAR StoreServ in Denmark. We have a very good consulting service together with the product."
"The solution fetches quick responses in milliseconds which can be within 40-50 milliseconds."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is easy to use and has good performance."
"It works well and we don't have any issues with this solution."
"I like that 3PAR can remake the disk online. That's one of the best features because when we first started, that was the best. The team provisioning feature was also a good one. Those features are the best for me, provisioning and online optimization, and the tier you can have for storage."
"Very recently, we are able to do a lot of data center automation by being able to script some of the 3PAR actions for our private cloud."
"HPE 3PAR has all the common storage features like cell provisioning and deduplication. Usually the solution is chosen by the customer as they have a preference, or the setup is already in their environment."
"We never had a blackout and we have never been offline."
"Some of the graphical user interface changes in the later versions of NetApp have not been as good as the older ones, like in the 9.5 era."
"During the initial setup, you need to know what you are doing."
"When it comes to the cloud, they might need to improve in terms of making it clear why someone would use a NetApp solution over cloud-made storage."
"When it comes to the connectivity on the back end, where the hardware is concerned—the cabling and the like—it could also be simplified to ease the communication between the nodes and between the other components of the infrastructure. I still find that a little bit complicated."
"NetApp should offer more training so everyone can learn about the products. Other vendors have a lot of training options. It would be great if NetApp would highlight how to use the features more so that every admin or person can gain more knowledge about this technology."
"The NetApp support could be better."
"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 have only used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvements suggestions yet."
"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."
"It would be better if there were more integrations."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"This solution could be improved by offering containerization. This is something many of my customers are looking for."
"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."
"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."
"The solution should include a free process in the HPE portal that uses serial numbers to verify that hardware is genuine."
"This solution is now at end-of-life."
"Cloud integration could be better. They can also add an NVMe to port to that. I would like to see NVMe in the next release. That's the future or the near future for storage. That will give us a real high throughput and some performance."
"HPE could improve by raising awareness when a new product is launched. They must think of ways to better serve and engage with their enterprise customers. HPE is selling enterprise products and mission-critical support."
"If HPE 3PAR could handle NAS and all things related to NAS, you would not need to have a mixture of different storages, storage boxes, one solution could fit all."
"The price of this solution should be lower."
"Here in Algeria, we are facing a lot of trouble finding partners and getting support from HPE. There should be better support here in our country."
"HPE 3PAR StoreServ is at its end of life and they are forcing us to purchase new hardware. They will no longer support this solution. They should provide support for a longer time. For example, 10 years instead of five years."
"HPE could improve by making an old flash system in order to compete with the current market. For the solution to be more competitive in the mid-range market they could increase the performance."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 43 reviews while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 28 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while HPE 3PAR StoreServ is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE 3PAR StoreServ writes "User-friendly graphical user interface and simplifies reporting for easy management". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas HPE 3PAR StoreServ is most compared with HPE Primera, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, HPE StorageWorks MSA and Dell PowerStore. See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE 3PAR StoreServ report.
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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?