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.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"The performance is very good."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The solution is very reliable."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"The initial setup is very straightforward. You simply plug it in and turn it on."
"The performance is very good on our servers. It's superior. And the QoS capabilities for providing work congestion protection are also important because about 99 percent of our servers are production servers."
"It offers a high level of availability, so pretty much near zero downtime."
"We like the compression, dedupe, and I/O on the PowerMax. They are better than on the XtremIO."
"It's faster and more resilient."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The SRDF site-to-site replication for the volumes is the most important feature for us. That enables us to do site recovery and replication for our VMware infrastructure."
"A huge benefit of the PowerMax has been the decreasing of our physical footprint. We recently did a consolidation where we went from 58 tiles down to 5. If we had used just the PowerMax, we could have gone from 58 tiles down to 2 tiles, which is huge space savings. If you have 56 newly available floor tiles on a raised floor data center, which you previously had to cool and provide power to, then now, not only are my costs going down, I now have more revenue opportunities because I have more space to put new customers."
"The stability is amazing. Zero downtime reported over the last years."
"The complete block and file sharing are the most usable features."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"The NAS is also extremely easy to set up."
"It is very stable."
"Being all-flash makes everything super-fast. It's also great to manage. That's the easiest part. We also have another SAN, from Pure, and the Unity is easier to manage than the Pure."
"I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like."
"This product is perfect for small, and mid-range customers who need to pay less, but still, get enterprise-level capabilities."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet. It's going to be released in the next versions. That would be the biggest win, if additional cloud support is built into the array."
"It was not proactive communication."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"I had to contact customer support when a drive failed as I was doing a couple of OS upgrades."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"The way Pure Storage does the controller storage warranty or replacement has been an issue for some people who just replace the controllers every couple of years, and that's where some of the confusion with pricing and support has come in. They should be clear on the way the controller replacements happen, as it is important to know whether or not you can get a good return on them, because it can be a little confusing."
"The system has dual controllers but does not have a high level of resiliency built-in."
"I would like to have support available in Spanish."
"We have issues that we don't know about, which Dell EMC fixes."
"They can make the GUI better, especially for the ones that come out of the box. We did encounter a bit of difficulty in setting up the storage. We had to deploy Solutions Enabler on a Linux machine to be able to fully interact with the storage. They need to upgrade the web interface for the management of the storage that comes out of the box. The management interface for NFS is also a bit old and not very intuitive."
"The GUI interface is very complicated and could be improved by streamlining the number of steps in the process."
"They should work with the storage engineers to better tweak the management tools to give them improved visibility into their data."
"I would like to see more development in the cloud environment. It would be good if it comes in the cloud kind of setup."
"PowerMax's software is highly stable, but we faced two hardware issues in one year. We had a failure of the storage director module, and the physical disk failed on another occasion. Dell EMC should improve its hardware quality."
"We've had a couple of little things come up, but for the most part, they've been pretty stable."
"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."
"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."
"There is an issue with data duplication occurring on the flash memory. It should be improved. Timely updates and upgrades to the latest versions would be great."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"The Host LUN ID is sequential by access in the hosts. When one LUN needs access by many hosts (for cluster purposes), in some cases the Host LUN ID remains different on each host."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost."
"We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of the backup procedures."
"Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it."
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 189 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?