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."The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"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."
"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."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"With all-flash it should be able to scale. You probably just need one 4U device and you have terabytes of space."
"It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs."
"Dell Unity XT is user-friendly and easy to use."
"We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions."
"After migration to Unity 300F, we were able to put more DBs on flash, reducing latency. The results were visible in the front-end systems, and all users noticed the improvement."
"This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain."
"Being all-flash makes everything super-fast. It's also great to manage. That's the easiest part. We also have another SAN, from Pure, and the Unity is easier to manage than the Pure."
"Stable flash storage platform with good scalability, efficiency, and speed."
"The most valuable features are stability and performance."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."
"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"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."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The software layer has to improve."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"There is an ESRS problem that we're facing where, for some reason, the other Unity has not been able to register to EMC. The support information is not upgrading and nobody can tell me what is wrong with it. It's a minor issue, the ESRS is still working, but it is something that is very confusing and nobody seems to know what to do about it."
"My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be."
"It should be lighter. It takes up a ton of rack space. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint."
"Improve the interface and provide more management capability."
"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."
"We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint."
"The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system."
"We have only used this solution for less than one year so I don't have any improvements suggestions yet."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The support can take a few days to have a response. However, the response that we do receive is very informative."
"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 190 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 16th 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, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, NetApp ASA and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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