We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series 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 high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The latency is good."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"I like how it separates the iSCSI drives from the standard shares. It has two different routes to it. I know most of the other solutions do this, but I just like the way that Dell EMC does it."
"I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs."
"It has compression, which allows you to store more data than you would normally under the arrays."
"The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data."
"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."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"The product’s quality of service guarantees the performance of each workload."
"The price of this solution is good."
"The solution offers very good reliable systems and storage for our clients."
"The most valuable feature of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its ability to store data well."
"Ability to cluster two storages together with HA availability."
"The most valuable feature of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its capability to tier to the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. Additionally, the integration is good and they are user-friendly."
"Last year, I did a DM Series installation with my colleague, and this installation was effortless because we had Lenovo support on the phone, so it was easy to get help if we had any problems."
"The FlexClone feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"The software layer has to improve."
"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 tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"The user interface could use improvement."
"Dell Unity XT could add a unit-to-unit replication. We haven't seen that because we don't have an additional one to test. However, it is not an improvement, but something that we would like to have visibility on how it's done or how it works."
"It might be nice to have more integrated features instead of having everything as a separate module, like the networking. The networking is attached separately in the back. It would be nice if that was more integrated with less ports."
"Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product."
"I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1."
"I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great."
"I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good."
"A customer had to buy VMX because Unity didn't have WORM."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series could improve by having a snapshot feature. Additionally, there can be other features added to help restore the data faster."
"I would like Lenovo to add a feature like IBM Easy Tier to DM Series. This is a crucial feature for the customers."
"The tool's pricing is high."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The solution should change the licensing model and allow customers to choose features based on their requirements."
"The solution needs a simpler licensing theme around the DM series. The problem is if you only need one of the features, you still have to buy the whole thing. The licensing needs to be more granular or flexible so you have the option to only license FlexCone or Inline Compression features."
"Many people do not realize that Lenovo has a storage solution, so better marketing from the vendor is needed."
"It takes a very long time to enter the management console, as well as to restart the system, and these are things that should be improved."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is ranked 21st in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is rated 7.6. 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 Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series writes "Simple deployment, stores data well, but missing features". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is most compared with NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series report.
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