We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp FAS Series 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 system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data."
"It's a much smaller footprint than our older storage arrays, which take up some six tiles, a lot of space in the data center. The Unity's are a lot smaller, and they're a lot faster."
"For me, the most valuable feature is the ease of management."
"We have integrated it with vSphere and SQL. There were no costs involved outside of our normal workload licensing, no costs that were specific to the Unity platform."
"The most valuable features are its performance and simplicity."
"We have simplified it down to where we're using one storage pool inside the Unity, whereas on the VNX, we had multiple storage pools. This has simplified that aspect for us. It would depend on each organization. We're heavy into VMware and this ties into it so simply. It's made it a lot easier for us. I create a datastore inside Unity, it just shows up in VMware. I love that tie-in."
"We have Dell EMC engineers helping us out and doing some over the shoulder training. They are working with our customer right now doing data migration over to Unities from the legacy Oracle stuff. While they're doing this, they're showing people how the Unities work and the ins and outs of the software interface."
"Adaptive balancing is a valuable feature."
"Better performance and lower costs."
"The most valuable features are compression and dedupe."
"At the moment, we use NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data to another filer at an offsite location for backup. So, I like this feature."
"One of the most valuable features offered is double-parity RAID, which guarantees that your data will stay intact. We're also able to provision storage and monitor which ones are really consuming storage."
"The support is very good."
"Other products lose performance over time, but NetApp OS is speed-optimized."
"The input and output per second performance are satisfactory."
"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."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"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."
"It is on the expensive side."
"I would like it to be a little bit easier to contact support. We can contact support, but we have to go through a phone tree. We get routed to different places. I might call support to say that I need a drive replaced and get transferred to three different groups before I get to the group I actually need."
"Dell EMC Unity is not sexy. It doesn't have all the flash and pizzazz of some of the other storage vendors."
"Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"Issues with slow responses from the support team."
"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""
"Because we can do synchronous replication between the two sites, this made the setup challenging for this piece. They did not know how to set this up initially. We ended up having to do bidirectional synchronous replication."
"The product’s pricing should be improved."
"I would like to see NetApp add incident support."
"It may need more flexibility to fight with other competing arrays."
"The product must support more drives."
"The solution's configuration is not flexible."
"There is no NetApp infrastructure set up here in Greece."
"There are some technical limitations, but it would be great to have in-line deduplication and in-line compression for the FAS series as well."
"The biggest issue we face is parts delivery. There's no local warehouse in Myanmar, so if a customer encounters a technical problem like an IMEI issue, they have to wait a long time for replacement parts."
"The solution can improve on the replication features."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while NetApp FAS Series is ranked 5th in Deduplication Software with 98 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp FAS Series is rated 8.8. 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 NetApp FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp AFF, HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and VAST Data. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp FAS Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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