We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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.
"Pure Storage technology allowed us to automate tasks, reducing something which started as a 12-hour turnaround down to about 15 minutes."
"With Pure Storage, we don't see any latency or IOPS. It has been a very seamless integration."
"The most valuable feature is its speed."
"I have seen a huge increase in speed and performance on our databases."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The simplicity of it. The performance is good, but the simplicity is the best thing. Storage management is quite complex, but Pure Storage is easy to manage."
"It is noticeably easier to manage than other appliances that we have."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"It has good performance."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"We have Dell EMC engineers helping us out and doing some over the shoulder training. They are working with our customer right now doing data migration over to Unities from the legacy Oracle stuff. While they're doing this, they're showing people how the Unities work and the ins and outs of the software interface."
"We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."
"The compression and deduplication that will be coming in version 4.3. With just those features, you're reducing the amount of data and the footprint on the hardware."
"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."
"The hardware and software of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy for us to use."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."
"This storage solution is both stable and scalable, and it works for our needs."
"The benefits are better up-time, better response time."
"I like the performance aspect of EF Series. It basically provides everything that we are looking for as a solution, very low latency and very high performance."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"It's too early to tell if we've seen a reduction in total cost of ownership. The solution is expensive."
"They could improve the price."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"It was not proactive communication."
"The EMC VNX Virtual Data Mover (VDM) software needs more improvement."
"There is no de-duplication. Unity used to be Bionics, which had de-duplication; however, in Dell Unity XT, the de-duplication was deprecated and is no longer available."
"The one thing that we would look at would be if they were to expand the file level features, just to give us a balance or a tier between it and Isilon options out there, for unstructured data."
"Compression and block deduplication on non-all-flash solutions."
"We noticed in the last release of code that there were some inefficiencies around getting our data efficiency up in terms of dedupe and compression."
"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."
"Things that could be improved include one-to-many replication, data deduplication, and asynchronous Fibre Channel replication. It is asynchronous on iSCSI and I would like to have that on the Fibre Channel. Unisphere-wise, I have to log in to each Unity as a unique environment. In VNX, I logged in to the domain and I was logged in to every VNX. So that's missing."
"I would like better monitoring capabilities: more historical data with more insight into the performance for the database. We now use a separate tool for it. Therefore, it would be nice if we could have that straight from the tool."
"I would like to shrink it more, if we can. The smaller, the better."
"Things like the FlexClones, SnapVault, SnapMirror, all of that. Some of it's available on the EF series, but we like what we have in the FAS system."
"The pricing could be cheaper and it should have documentation in more languages, specifically, Russian."
"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."
"As far as the manageability, being able to port between the two and have to do less training in-house from a customer point of view, that would be the part to improve."
"The price of the All Flash solution is very high."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"It needs a better management tool."
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Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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