We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Pure Storage FlashArray 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."Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"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."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"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."
"It has good, reliable, fast storage."
"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 most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"The NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR."
"It has reduced the latency in application and database reads and writes... All-flash, it's fast. We have the 650 model which is all-flash, upgraded from VNX. It just flies."
"I like that the performance is very good."
"The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive."
"I like that when you log in it gives you a dashboard of what your storage looks like."
"This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up."
"We use it to implement all our VDI solutions."
"They have really good baked in analytics to show you trends for growth history, so it does help with future planning for data growth."
"It's very fast and very easy to use. It performs well and is both flexible and compatible. We like it because it's easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"Having an intuitive user interface to get things running is great."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"Before we used Pure Storage it took 93 days of employees who run the database to back up and restore databases. The scale of deployment basically went from several days to a few minutes."
"The back-end data reporting for Pure Storage is phenomenal. The data that you can see on the performance of your customers' array, so you can be proactive about upgrades or enhancements, and is a phenomenal tool to have access to as a partner. I haven't seen this type of stuff out of anything of the other storage systems."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"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."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"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."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"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."
"Our customers are mostly happy with Unity except for the price. We primarily sell to enterprise companies because small companies cannot afford it."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"I think Dell EMC should be more careful in appointing partners, and they need to have better control over their partners. And if their partner has some problems with them, we should not suffer."
"There are features still to come, like compression and deduplication on hybrid platforms, VDM improvements to be developed for NAS environments, and also improvements in the “self-migration” tools to push or pool information (to assist the migrations to and mostly from third-party arrays)."
"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."
"I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"What it needs to do is work a little closer with solutions, like VMware, so it understands the particular workloads that are on it. Today, it does not understand the applications which are running against it."
"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"As long as they always improve on IOPS speed, that's all we're really looking for. The faster the storage can be the more we can do speed of application and speed of use."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while Pure Storage FlashArray is ranked 3rd in All-Flash Storage with 174 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashArray is rated 9.2. 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 Pure Storage FlashArray writes "Effective provisioning, helpful support, and reliable". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas Pure Storage FlashArray is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Pure Storage FlashBlade. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Pure Storage FlashArray report.
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