We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Dell PowerMax NVMe based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the comparison parameters, Dell Unity XT came out ahead of Dell PowerMax NVMe. Although the two products have similar pricing, support quality, and ROI, users found Dell PowerMax NVMe more difficult to deploy and with fewer valuable features.
"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."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"The most valuable features in Pure Storage FlashArray are deduplication and active cluster."
"The most valuable features are the replication of data and the continuous snapshot that we can take from the disc."
"It is an easy to use product for all of my team members."
"Has also helped simplify storage for us. The other person we put in there, took about a week to implement. And we had both arrays set up within around four hours with a thirty minute drive time between the two locations."
"The solution is very reliable."
"It simplifies storage."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"Technical support has been excellent."
"We removed the need to observe whether we ran into issues with the performance of disks or number of IOPS. Previously, our Oracle Database would throw us performance errors. Now, with PowerMax, everything runs smoothly."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It has reduced our footprint in different physical locations."
"PowerMax NVMe has made it a lot easier to understand how much we are able to provision. It has made it a lot faster to provision new things. 90% of my time for provisioning has been reduced. Also, it has made it very easy to understand and see everything behind it versus the older heritage, where Dell EMC was very convoluted and hard to get working. Things that used to take an hour, probably now take five to 10 minutes."
"The PowerMax software and CloudIQ let us get an inside view of our compression and compaction, as well as our usage of the storage."
"Enterprise Cloud Storage is the most valuable feature, along with the data services which come with it, plus the deduplication and compression."
"This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up."
"Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios"
"The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter."
"We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources."
"It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily."
"The all-flash feature is really boosting up the VMware. It is helping our virtual machines to perform better."
"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."
"I like the easy management with the new Unisphere management and the HTML5 interface."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"There are many features which need to be added, particularly on the replication side."
"I can't see where they can make anything better, unless, of course, they lower their prices even more."
"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."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"The internal garbage collection process has been fixed recently in some OS updates so it is more efficient but that could be just a little better."
"Dell PowerMax NVMe is costly compared to other solutions."
"The initial setup was complex. ESRS is a very complex solution to put into our environment, because it requires external access to the Internet. That's a very tough thing for us to do, because we are a PCI and PII company. We store a lot of data for people which is personal. Therefore, going out to the Internet is not our preferred path."
"There are some stability issues that we just recently experienced. We hope the next release will solve these problems."
"It's a relatively new product, but for the next release I would like to see higher bandwidth on the front-end adapters. This would allow even greater scalability for critical workloads and consolidation for non-critical workloads. The hosts may not require that level of I/O performance today. However, it allows us to scale physical non-cloud environments without large investment."
"The initial setup process is difficult."
"There is room for improvement in terms of integration with various service providers for public clouds."
"I would like NVMe to be end-to-end in the next release. Right now, it is not end-to-end."
"Support of the product can be slow and an administrative challenge: planning, scheduling, and overseeing data center access for a Dell EMC rep. One improvement could be to enable a self-maintenance option. The requirements that we go through to get Dell EMC onsite to replace failed drives, power supplies, and other small redundant parts can be unnecessarily complex. If simplified, they could send us the parts, then we could replace them much faster, more easily, and truly within the SLA parameters."
"Its replication technology could be better."
"I would like them to continue to build on the solution and expand on the functionality, like replication."
"We do a lot of VMware. It only integrates with VMware in one way, which is virtual volumes. I don't really have any visibility on anything else. From VMware, I can't look into Unity. From Unity, I can't look into VMware unless I am using virtual volumes, where they integrate together happily, but we are not using that. I would like better integration for non-virtual volume VMware use."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"In the dashboard there could be notification of duplicate files and the like, so we don't have to rely on Windows to do that."
"They should have more wizards for customers so they can do more of the self-service types of functions, in terms of upgrades and patching, although it's pretty easy right now."
"Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that was deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have."
"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."
Dell PowerMax NVMe is ranked 8th in All-Flash Storage with 66 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 188 reviews. Dell PowerMax NVMe is rated 8.8, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerMax NVMe writes "Simplified storage provisioning for us, enabling us to assign any volumes in two to three minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell PowerMax NVMe is most compared with Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem, Huawei OceanStor Dorado, Dell XtremIO and HPE Primera, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and VMware vSAN. See our Dell PowerMax NVMe vs. Dell Unity XT report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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I have used all, EMC, and HPE 3Par, VNX, Unity, etc. All are OK. But for long term Flash Storage, I would take a look at Hitachi F Series. Best reliability hands down and they provide non-disruptive migrations, no server downtime, no scheduling with users, etc. NDM makes Hitachi a no brainer.
Many insightful answers already provided.
I would just add the following based on my experience. With so many employees an located in different places, its important for you to list the issues being encountered with the present setup, in addition of the need to upgrade, of course :
- Latency -if being experienced generally or specifically to a location as this may indicate a network issue and this is better solved before the upgrade to new storage in order not to disappoint users
-Type of need : analytics/ Big data, classical operational transactions, archiving - in this case you may go for Tiering ( that is have NVMe as the top Tier and SSD as Tier 2). Users are normally demanding but given the costs in a time of budgetary cuts, better offer them different Tiers with front end ones data residing on the better Tier
- Finally, also make sure you have some well structured storage network as you don't want some big fat slow Database VMs located in one of your data centers impacting on the performance of your leaner VMs provisioned on NVMe.
Hello Robert,
What you need to know is in the world of storage infrastructure all the constructor offers a portfolio group by categories like Entry Level Storage, Midrange Storage, Enterprise storage
PowerMax is an enterprise storage on the DELL EMC portfolio
Enterprise storage is usually used for Mission critical Application where the availability required is 99,9999%. With enterprise storage you can manage approximatively 15Millions of IOPS which are very important when you want to take decision to consolidation storage.
Personally, if you cannot expect to reach Millions of IOPS I recommend to go to DELL EMC Unity XT, otherwise move forward to Power Max
PowerMax offer many features like SLO for categories of Application (Diamond, Gold, Silver)
Diamond latency < 1ms
Gold Latency >1ms
Silver Latency >10ms, <20ms
You have also FastVP to move Hot Data to the fastest TIER storage
Physically PowerMax use a Virtual matrix to interconnect all the Engine which can reach 8 depending of the model
Midrange storage use only two controller and provide you and availability of 99,999%
Unity XT is better than HPE MSA or 3PAR
If you want other informations you can contact me
Does PowerMax have storage virtualization for external storage as part of the package?