We performed a comparison between DDN IntelliFlash and Dell Unity XT based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"This solution is very scalable."
"The most valuable feature is that maintenance is free."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"We put a fair amount of stress on it because we run sequel workloads and we run web applications where the same web files are hit over and over. We have had almost zero stability issues with that SAN, that has been really great for us."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It is scalable. We can add additional tools if we need to expand it."
"The valuable features of Unity include that it's flexible, has a friendly user-interface, and provides good performance."
"It is nice the way ESRS works with remote support, being able to remote in and take a look at problems proactively."
"The Unisphere management interface: We are very familiar with it. It manages all the EMC devices that we have. Management is easy because it is part of Unisphere, which is self-learning."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"It's unified, it does block and file, so that is pretty important to my customers who might have file servers around their environment. I can roll them all up into a single array, as well as provide block storage for them on one array."
"It's easy to handle for administrators and it's a unified system. It's not as complex as Celerra systems or CX4 Clariions to administrate. You can do everything with one GUI."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"There are scenarios with very specific functionality around VMware integration particularly to do with the way we'd like to manage LUNs in VMware. The tools are pretty good but there's room for improvement there."
"The GUI could improve, it could be more intuitive. There is hidden functionality."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"It would be nice to have a better view of the allocated capacity on their Platform as a Service solution because we have to do some manual calculations to understand how much we are going to pay every month to use the storage that is allocated."
"I would rate this solution an eight. There's always room for improvement, nobody is perfect to get a ten out of ten. They do what they do well. It's not cheap but we it's for uses that we needed."
"It is a bit expensive."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"Scalability of this solution could be improved."
"It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well. Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves... It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage."
"We have only used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvements suggestions yet."
"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."
"I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"The NAS capabilities of Unity - I have to say there are a lot of things I miss. For example, deduplication for hybrid. I have tons of customers with VNX and dedupe. These customers achieve around 50% dedupe efficiency and they mostly use them for archive. If you're talking about 50TB of NAS, which is stored in a 25TB repository, which is very economical, and you can not provide that in a Unity hybrid box, you have problems."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, NetApp AFF and Tintri VMstore, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ.
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