We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and SolidFire 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 has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"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."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it."
"It is nice the way ESRS works with remote support, being able to remote in and take a look at problems proactively."
"It is lightning fast, low on power and heat, and has a small footprint with great performance."
"Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space."
"VMware integration: Grants both the Storage and Virtual Administrator the ability to create and mount datastores, or even to check how much space each VM is consuming."
"Because I always need to trouble shooting for IOPS & database (DB) performance issues. I can quickly focus on what is part of the issue. I can decrease downtime and can plan next year's extended capacity budget."
"The replication is big for us. We use file services on Unity and it has a really nice file services interface. It's also easy to manage. It's really easy in terms of provisioning, replication. There are no real tricks to it. It's just easy."
"It does great deduplication. From a storage perspective, we save money being able to dedupe right on the disk"
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"The quality of service for minimum iOS, to maximum iOS in a multi-terminal environment is very powerful. The SQL service feature is the best part of SolidFire."
"The simplicity of it."
"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"It is on the expensive side."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult."
"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."
"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 could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system."
"Firmware Upgrades in EMC Unity require you to manually download OS and Drive firmware, this should be integrated (Nimble does this). When you order an EMC Unity, you have to specify the block size. This is weird for me and even weirder that you cannot change this afterwards, you should be able to specify per LUN/datastore (Nimble does this as well)."
"Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out."
"This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes."
"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."
"SolidFire could improve in terms of hardware robustness."
"The technical support is really bad and has to be improved."
"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."
"The upgrade process could be better."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."
"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 190 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 18th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. 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 SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN. See our Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire report.
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