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."The solution is scalable."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."
"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."
"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."
"The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly."
"After migration to Unity 300F, we were able to put more DBs on flash, reducing latency. The results were visible in the front-end systems, and all users noticed the improvement."
"It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNS. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy."
"In the hybrid version, I would say they are fast. They have fully automated storage tiering. In the all-flash version, higher performance, compression, data replication."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"When I have an issue and need technical support, I reach out to them either through chat or by submitting a service request, and the response is good."
"The solution overall has high performance."
"It is easy to manage. A lot of the system manages itself."
"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."
"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."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The dashboard is such that you don't need to be a storage expert to administer it."
"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."
"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."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"Since Dell took over EMC, the support has been very bad. Before, the support was fine. Now, the support is slow or they don't react."
"It would be better if there were more integrations."
"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."
"We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug."
"The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far."
"There is no de-duplication. Unity used to be Bionics, which had de-duplication; however, in Dell Unity XT, the de-duplication was deprecated and is no longer available."
"I would like to see more compression and deduplication added to the solution. Today, our compression is about 2:1 and other solutions give us about 4:1 or 5:1."
"It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"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!."
"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"SolidFire should start from two nodes instead of the four nodes. That's the only thing. In a lot of solutions, we have to use four nodes, that's the better thing. But as a starting point, two is better. That's why their starting point is expensive."
"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th 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, VMware vSAN and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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