We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC Unity XT based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two products received similar reviews in most categories. According to reviews, Dell EMC PowerStore appears to be a bit more robust and therefore more appropriate for larger environments.
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"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 initial setup was straightforward."
"It has its own file formatting protocol, which saves a lot of space."
"The most valuable feature of the solution for me is the deduplication part, especially since most of the servers in our organization are Windows-based servers."
"Currently, the features of replication and deduplication have been very important to us."
"The support is very good."
"The administration tools take advantage of machine learning and make recommendations to the admins, and that makes the administration easier."
"The solution is easy to use and has good performance."
"A particularly valuable feature is its simplicity."
"We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."
"A lot of the Unisphere interfaces are greatly improved in terms of monitoring capabilities, alerting, and ease of use. Setting up the storage and the file system are all just a few clicks away."
"It is pretty stable. I like the stability, because everything works like it should. We made it all redundant. So, we don't have anything to worry about."
"My storage team likes Unity's replication features. Three-site replication is a unique feature that EMC offers us."
"The most valuable feature is the fast cache with functionality rewrite."
"VMware integration makes the life of our engineers easier, as we are almost 100% virtualized and this feature is used on a daily basis."
"I like its performance and support."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"We need better data deduplication."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."
"You cannot delegate permissions."
"It's also only supported with a limited amount of switches."
"Could be improved by including a synchronizing feature for the file systems."
"The NAS part is very poor. It's very basic. Even Dell EMC has said that to us. We are waiting for version 3 of PowerStore for that. This must be improved and it is in the roadmap."
"While using Dell PowerStore's interface in our organization, we sometimes miss out on some information."
"The UI should be a little more user-friendly to manage."
"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"The price of Dell Unity XT could improve."
"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."
"I would like to see them add Storage Groups, like we have had in Clariions and VNXs."
"Dell Unity XT could improve the compatibility of some of the features. Some of my customers had some problems. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the solution to have advanced AI and ML features."
"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."
"I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great."
"The pricing is a bit high. We'd like it to come down."
"Its replication technology could be better."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". 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 PowerStore is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, Pure Storage FlashArray, NetApp AFF, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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Hello Yasin,
The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
The Unity 400 is a rather old, a much less powerfull solution and at its best holds ssd flashdrives if at all. Currently you have the Unity 8xx model, which has more CPU punch and therefore maxes out less fast on CPU utilisation. What this means is that you can add more shelves and disks and workloads to it before you hit the roof.
The powerstore 1200 is an nvme storage, is 60% more powerfull (compared to FC/SCSI-SSD on Unity) in our case, and has higher datareduction rates. If the unity reaches out to a datareduction rate of 1.5 or 2, the Powerstore T1200 is capable of 3 to 3.5 datareduction, probably due to half its blocksize. The price of the device is pretty much dependant on the price of its media, and therefore the Powerstore T1200 is the absolute winner.
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Another aspect is that the Powerstore can be used to build a cluster of arrays compared to the sync/asynch replication only feature of the Unity series, rendering the mirrored volumes unuseable unless one fails over to it, like in a disaster recovery scenario.
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The Powerstore also allows true A/A volumes on both sides . What this means is that one can build stretched vSphere clusters and the loss of your array in one site will still allow writing to the alternate protected disk, transparently ! You can have site local writes to your volumes and remain in sync without a need to cross site write.
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There is not much of a reason to settle for the Unity anymore, though some still prefer the Unity for NAS compared to Powerstore, but honestly speaking I won't recommend to use any of both for that purpose unless for limitted useage. Unity allocates RAM ressources dynamically when used for FC/SCSI AND NAS , whereas the Powerstore is initialized in a kind of split off of RAM ressources between NAS/FC SCSI at installation time. The ressource allocation is fixed and can't be altered lateron. Thats a hard call. So I'd favour the Unity only if you use it for low/moderate NAS needs in combination with FC/SCSI or block data and you don't have the budget nor the size to use a NAS optimised array on top.