We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE Nimble Storage based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Dell EMC Unity XT has a slight edge in this comparison due to the higher marks it received for its scaling abilities.
"It has improved my organization because now have lower latency, we get fewer complaints from customers, and we see a constant response time."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"The predictive performance analytics is a very good feature, as our system is performing better than before."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"Non-disruptive upgrades: You can upgrade at anytime without worry."
"On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the most comfortable pricing, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The inline deduplication and data reduction capabilities have been the most valuable."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"Storage Snapshots have been really nice. They allow us to do backups without impacting our production workload that much. The scalability, the ability to add disks dynamically and adjust our workload as needed, has also been really helpful. That definitely makes my job easier. And the interface for managing Unity is very easy. The integrations between VMware Hypervisor and Dell EMC are top-notch, so it's been really easy to use and manage."
"Stable flash storage platform with good scalability, efficiency, and speed."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface."
"We particularly like the user interface on cloud IQ with this product."
"All-flash performance, Snapshotting capabilities and replication are all valuable features."
"The storage capacity efficiency is phenomenal. It is off the charts in comparison to the compression ratios that we got before. We are able to save a lot more to the device."
"InfoSight. It's AI for the data center. It's very easy, it does a lot of the work for the customer... InfoSight and the whole system, help them to deal with troubleshooting."
"The most valuable feature is InfoSight, and the ability that InfoSight gives you, from insight within your environment to what is going on at the storage layer."
"We get storage access without the need for more human monitoring of those resources."
"Regarding their support, you always get through to somebody who knows exactly what they're talking about."
"We have seen our average latency go from four milliseconds to point four. Therefore, we are getting 10 times better performance down to the end user on everything. We have seen an increase in our IOPS by ten times."
"The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies."
"It's very stable and fast, and I am very happy with the deduplication. It saves a lot of space, which is great."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"Its price could be cheaper. It is not the cheapest one out there, but I'm not directly involved in the figures and negotiations."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"The support team is well-versed in the AMG solution, having received comprehensive training. They also boast strong partnerships in both VNAM and Korea. The system's user-friendliness is a primary consideration in their choice of solution, emphasizing the importance of service. They place a strong emphasis on service, occasionally requiring approvals. However, with full installations, they have achieved almost uniformity. Their storage approach differs from a consolidated business-based model; instead, it is application-centric. Their investment in solutions is geared towards specific needs, such as the banking or information system, acquiring smaller storage units individually."
"We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity where some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance, but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve. Also, we had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that."
"If you compare it with VMAX, where we communicate with the box through Solutions Enabler and there are a lot of commands and a lot of flexibility, the command line for Unity needs to enhanced."
"I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"The solution should include a free process in the HPE portal that uses serial numbers to verify that hardware is genuine."
"On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domain - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily."
"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."
"HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers."
"They keep talking about doing one-to-many replication. This is what we'd like to see, just to help with data replication."
"There should be faster interfaces."
"There are customers who want to do some different things with the Microsoft Resilient File System. There are some customers who want to do different types of connectivity. I do not know if I would call that an improvement, necessarily, because if you want that, you should get a different product."
"I would like to have more administrative rights, for example, root-level administrative rights to the underlying OS of the storage array. We want more access to the kind of underlying infrastructure of the storage array rather than relying on support. However, most companies are looking to have more managed solutions which is the opposite direction of what I want."
"The solution needs to be an active-active controller."
"I would like to see integration with OneView, at least for reporting or some sort of monitoring."
"The solution could improve by having more granularity. For example, having the ability to go deeper into specific IO channels or specific latency issues that can happen would be a benefit. HPE has this ability on their side but it would be useful to have it on our side."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 119 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN, IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF. See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
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