Dell Unity XT vs VMware vSAN comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and VMware solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #4 in AFS , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 10.4% mindshare in the category. VMware is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.8, and holds a 16.7% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN 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.

To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

November 2024

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Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

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HCI

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson

Storage and Backup Architect at Concentrix

Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities

We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. The CAT tool and also the ability to upgrade the unit's place grades are great. It allows for in-place control or upgrades. It's a very simple implementation. They have a good tool to analyze upgrades. The stability is good. Technical support has been excellent.

Read full review

Srikanth Purushothaman

DIRECTOR at Vellore Online Systems

Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication

The initial setup is very straightforward. Even upgrading the firmware is very nice. You don't need to shut down. Previously, we used to have a shutdown, and now we hand over to one more processor, upgrade the one processor, and then switch back to this process, and then we'll do the upgrade for the process so there is no downtime. I'd rate the ease of implementation nine out of ten. Since we are holding almost all the data, which are all critical and confidential, the deployment is always on-prem only. It takes a maximum of two to three hours. The solution is almost finalized before ordering. We plan what has to be done, and how many services have to be connected through the HBA. Based on that, the number of fiber ports should have been ordered along with the system. Normally, it comes with two fiber-channel HBA adapters. We used to order with four channels instead of going for a sand switch. We connect three servers directly into process A and process B. Before getting into the server, all the servers should be up and running with the HBA connector with the fiber cable ready. Once we install the server, we will see if the firmware is up-to-date or if it is one month old since the shipment takes at least one or two months before it reaches our hands. If there is any new update, we will check with them to see whether the new firmware is good or if there are any bugs in it. If the support team says there is no bug, it means we will update the firmware and create a pool. If it is a hybrid pool, we'll do a mix and combinations of flash as well as the NSS for the images. For the data, we have only the flash itself, and we use a rate six for the data. Previously, with the regular SaaS drives, we used to have a rate ten; however, with the flash drives, we used to have rate five or rate six only. Normally, in-house inside the rack, we need two people. Otherwise, one engineer itself will do. If it is a flash drive, only one person itself will be enough. If it is three bay drives with 144 TB or 288 TB, then we'll go for one more person to fix inside the rack. Once it is fixed, the installation will be done only by one person. For maintenance, normally, we check the firmware updates within a month, or we check every 30 to 45 days to seek out firmware updates. We provide maintenance to our customers. For other issues, we might call technical support. Most things we can manage.

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Lipaz Hessel

Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"The solution is very straightforward to set up."

"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The all-flash feature is really boosting up the VMware. It is helping our virtual machines to perform better."

"I like its performance and support."

"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."

"Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server."

"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 NAS is also extremely easy to set up."

"There are also DR and data protection functions that we found in the new Unity, now that we are stepping up from VNX and other storage appliances, that we've started implementing."

"I like the ease of configuration, the quick setup and the fact that it seems to be hardened. We haven't had any issues with them. In terms of simplicity of ownership, once they're running you don't have to touch them. They're also simple to manage. We came from the VNXe 3200s so it's very similar."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."

"The product is highly scalable and significantly supports our organization's needs."

"vSAN is integrated into VMware."

"The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them."

"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."

"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."

"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."

"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."

"It feels more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses rather than enterprises."

"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."

"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."

"It is on the expensive side."

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers."

"The user interface could use improvement."

"Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that."

"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."

"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."

"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."

"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."

"The user interface could be improved. The Dell Compellent user interface is fantastic, but the Unity user interface is, in comparison, pretty lousy. It's functional, and I can do what I need, but the Dell Compellent user interface is so much more intuitive and user-friendly."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."

"We have encountered some challenges related to administrative tasks and licensing issues for the product."

"There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings."

"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."

"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."

"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."

"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."

"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"The product is expensive."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"All the licenses are included from day one of your purchase of the product, so you don't have to buy licenses separately. There are no additional costs to be paid for the maintenance of the solution."

"In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment."

"The solution is extremely functional for the price that we pay for it. It is worth the investment."

"Pricing for this product is manageable, though slightly higher than comparable products."

"The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price."

"The pricing was quite okay compared to others. We probably got it cheaper because we were the first ones out of the gate, but I would say that it's good value for the money."

"The solution’s pricing is competitive."

"It is shipped with all licensed, included for this product range, no need to buy additional licenses"

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."

"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."

"We have increased our user productivity."

"Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."

"It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive."

"This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."

"There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive."

"I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Educational Organization

70%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

51%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

After implementation, there are limitations, such as the number of paths, file systems, and replication options. It f...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can reco...

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What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

They’re both great solutions and I’ve used both. EMC is being VERY aggressive on pricing which may be the undoing of...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance. I will sh...

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 37% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 43% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 6% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

November 2024

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

November 2024

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

November 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

vSAN

Learn More

Pure Storage

Video not available

Dell Technologies

VMware

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. 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."

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: November 2024.

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