We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE 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."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."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The solution is scalable."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up."
"It's a much smaller footprint than our older storage arrays, which take up some six tiles, a lot of space in the data center. The Unity's are a lot smaller, and they're a lot faster."
"It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended."
"The way it takes the Snaps, that is one of the best features. Snapshot performance is what is key in the Unity, compared to a traditional VNX."
"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's easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us."
"The solution is very easy to set up."
"The solution is very easy to troubleshoot. It's one of the most valuable features. It also doesn't take long to deploy and normally it comes with a three-year warranty."
"We have been working with the solution for around a year and so far it has shown itself to be stable."
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is simple to use"
"Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is quite an elementary box, no frills. It does not have all the functionality of the DM but it is acceptable, it does its task. It integrates pretty well."
"This solution is good for virtualization and meets the need for CPU and RAM requirements."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series are the dual controllers, available installation documentation, and the option of multiple host bus adapter interfaces."
"Fewer features is not necessarily a negative as it leads to simpler operation and lower price."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"The software layer has to improve."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"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."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"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."
"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."
"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)."
"It is missing some features, like deduplication."
"The initial installation is straightforward and took approximately one hour. However, the full process was not as simple as IBM."
"The storage processors have less port expansion than previous high-end VNX arrays. Data compression is only available in all-flash pools."
"The uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could."
"Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication."
"A customer had to buy VMX because Unity didn't have WORM."
"I think Dell EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer."
"Improvements can be made to the product's performance."
"ThinkSystem could be better integrated with backup software like Commvault, Veritas, or Symantec."
"The difficult part comes when dealing with the host. You have to enable multi-pathing and other aspects that are needed for proper configuration. I don't know if there is room for a more hyper-conversion structure to work with, but this would be easier."
"There could be a snapshot feature in the solution."
"Usually, when a part fails, we have to replace it and it takes a while. It would be better if the part could be available locally here in Kenya so we don't have to wait so long to repair the solution."
"The solution could be more scalable, although it suits our present needs."
"Its performance could be faster."
"The features are limited."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is ranked 20th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series 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 Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series writes "Provides good stability and is reliable in terms of performance". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and Huawei OceanStor, whereas Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Nimble Storage. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series report.
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