We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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 solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"The deduplication and compression rates are beyond impressive."
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is its high stability level."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"On the Data Domain side, the most attractive feature is the compression ratio, which none of the other products in the market are currently able to provide. On the Unity side, what customers mostly like is the availability guarantee."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"All-flash performance, Snapshotting capabilities and replication are all valuable features."
"They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use."
"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."
"It's the simplicity part of it. It's the ease of management, it's the call home, the CloudIQ functionality. It's all built in. I think Dell EMC has put a lot of thought into it."
"It is scalable. We can add additional tools if we need to expand it."
"Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios"
"The NetApp EF-Series gave our organization easy access to our data bases."
"The hardware and software of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy for us to use."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"It provides multi-protocol, which is what gives the edge when it comes to big lineage PC workloads."
"Its performance is most valuable. This solution is much faster than other as well as older storage solutions. The performance of the system is very good. We are getting 50 times better experience than the older storages. We are using AFF 300. It also has native cloud integration and most of the features."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the performance of the database access."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"In the next release I would like to see integration into other third-party player providers like Google."
"The price of this solution could be improved."
"The price could be better."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"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."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"The connectivity needs improvement. You do not have the possibility to have a file and block connectivity at the same time on the same machine. It has limited ability to do so."
"I would like to have secure mobile connectivity going forward. This would help me be more proactive."
"I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good."
"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."
"I would like to see a more seamless virtual box integration with the physical box which can replicate, because the setup of the replication is very difficult right now."
"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."
"The only challenge I've ever had was with a Drive firmware upgrade."
"Problems with I/O modules, with bugs that came out that really should have been caught before the product was released."
"A customer had to buy VMX because Unity didn't have WORM."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"A little more manageability, a simpler management interface. It's not necessarily that it's way overly complex. It's just that it's not as easy as the FAS series."
"We need a center related to NetApp in Egypt so that we can deal with them directly."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"There could be better integration with some of our Cisco products."
"This solution has limited storage."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems."
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Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 188 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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