We performed a comparison between DDN IntelliFlash and Dell Unity XT based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"The most valuable features of Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its superior performance compared to other flash tiers, as well as its ease of use, with an intuitive user interface that is simple to deploy and use."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"It has reduced our electricity usage by reducing the amount of disks needed for the virtual environment."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It's very fast. We were seeing read latencies of less than one millisecond. It is robust."
"EasyTier/hotcaching: Valuable because it allows greater performance than standard SAS disks"
"Data Compression: Up to 80% space reduction in the database"
"It provides a combination of all the protocols that you need, without losing deduplication and compression."
"It performed great originally, and when it performed great, it was awesome."
"High performance and ease-of-management are the most valuable features."
"The replication is big for us. We use file services on Unity and it has a really nice file services interface. It's also easy to manage. It's really easy in terms of provisioning, replication. There are no real tricks to it. It's just easy."
"For me, the most valuable feature is the ease of management."
"Because I always need to trouble shooting for IOPS & database (DB) performance issues. I can quickly focus on what is part of the issue. I can decrease downtime and can plan next year's extended capacity budget."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"The Unity XT box is very strong. It doesn't break. The MTBF time is very large so you don't have to worry about faults or outages in your operations."
"Quick Snapshots and cloning are key features."
"It has made deployment, configuration, and maintenance a lot simpler."
"I like the idea that it can compress and dedupe inline. That is quite a stunning feature for mid-range customers."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"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."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"The software layer has to improve."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"It's somewhat scalable, but maybe not so much as some of the competition."
"We had just one small stability problem with power flapping and it did not start up again automatically. We had to access service ports and manually restart the storage processors."
"It only keeps one hour of real-time data without the ability to do deep analysis of each element."
"Technical support is bad. It'd grade them at 30% or 40%. The response time is terrible."
"In the proxy section you can’t choose a user account and password, so it is not allowed at the moment to go out, if customer has such constellation."
"Snapshots are not as easy to access as on a NetApp device."
"They need to offer better integration for a virtual platform to enable you to create hyper-converged solution."
"Performance is horrible now. Our original intent was to buy new storage in about two years. But since it became a critical urgency for us, we decided to purchase a new one in two or three months."
"Our request to Dell EMC for improvement was in the reporting and monitoring areas. Dell EMC built up a cloud ID so that we could see the overall storage numbers. We needed to have the proper KPIs to be able to see and manage things."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"We've got an ongoing issue with a Unity where some power supply fans spin up. We've had a whole bunch of hardware changed as a result but I still have an open SR which has been a struggle. It doesn't seem to affect performance, but it's something that we're hoping the engineers can resolve. Also, we had some issues with an upgrade where we can't manage a device, after the upgrade. So we had to have a ticket in for that."
"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."
"I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good."
"We cannot connect directly with Dell due to sanctions."
"Thick provisioning of LUNs."
"Issues with slow responses from the support team."
Earn 20 points
DDN IntelliFlash is ranked 29th in All-Flash Storage with 11 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 190 reviews. DDN IntelliFlash is rated 7.4, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DDN IntelliFlash writes "Good features with an easy initial setup but technical support is slow ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". DDN IntelliFlash is most compared with VAST Data, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF and Tintri VMstore T7000, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem.
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