We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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."It helps to simplify storage because it has an easy front-end to access everything."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"We've had to use tech support on a number of occasions. They did everything remotely and talked us all the way through. They fixed the issue within 30 minutes. Every single time we contact them, they're perfect. I would give their technical support a ten out of ten."
"Data deduplication is one feature I found to be the most valuable in the tool...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"All our junior partners can administer the storage arrays. It is simple and easy to use. We don't have to dedicate a whole team of full time people to work on it."
"Technical support has been amazing."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"It's just very easy for general block storage."
"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."
"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."
"The valuable features of Unity include that it's flexible, has a friendly user-interface, and provides good performance."
"We have resolved IT challenges with this solution. It sped up our environment. We went from spinning disk to all-flash, which reduced our footprint."
"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 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."
"The NAS is also extremely easy to set up."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is the GUI, it is very good. End users can manage using it. Additionally, the documentation is of high quality and it integrates well."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"The storage features are valuable."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"The only time that we had problems with it was that there was a bug in the VVol implementation but, outside of that, it has been flawless."
"It would be nice if Pure had something in its portfolio that provided higher deduplication and compression for backups."
"They should work on their upgrades, they're not smooth."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"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."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"FlashArray's capacity for forecasting should be improved because it needs to be a bit more current. I think it's bundled with the deduplication and other compression factors. We need more user interfaces for forecasting in this software and more interfaces need to be integrated with this array management tool."
"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."
"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."
"The user interface could use improvement."
"I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix."
"For the integration of the VPLEX function for Cross IDC structure, they should integrate the function into the SP controller."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"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."
"The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host."
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The initial setup is complex."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is rated 8.8. 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 NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
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