We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN 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."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'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 solution is very straightforward to set up."
"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."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The most valuable thing for our use case is the flexibility to have multiple-protocol support."
"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."
"I like the ease of configuration, the quick setup and the fact that it seems to be hardened. We haven't had any issues with them. In terms of simplicity of ownership, once they're running you don't have to touch them. They're also simple to manage. We came from the VNXe 3200s so it's very similar."
"Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server."
"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."
"Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system."
"It is nice the way ESRS works with remote support, being able to remote in and take a look at problems proactively."
"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."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"The solution has high performance."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"It is on the expensive side."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"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."
"On the data domains - for the Unity product, but specifically for data domain - I would like a much easier interface for managing, for actually going in and having one place where I could get all of the different parts of the overall unit. And I would also like to be able to identify individual disks a lot more easily."
"It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well. Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves... It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage."
"Support Responsiveness & time to fix bugs should be improved."
"Problems with I/O modules, with bugs that came out that really should have been caught before the product was released."
"Licensing costs could be reduced."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"It isn't easy to find trusted partners for the product. The solution has issues with mid-level storage and does not come with enterprise storage."
"Compression and block deduplication on non-all-flash solutions."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"This product is very expensive."
"It could be cheaper."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
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