We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE Nimble Storage based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Dell EMC Unity XT has a slight edge in this comparison due to the higher marks it received for its scaling abilities.
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"It worked flawlessly."
"The code upgrades are very smooth."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"Support has been helpful."
"The mobile app is very helpful."
"The stability and performance are the best things about the solution."
"The complete block and file sharing are the most usable features."
"There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy."
"It is completely reliable. The plugins for it are quite mature. I don't really have any issues with the interactions with vSphere, they all work as intended."
"It's very reliable. I have not had an issue with Dell EMC Unity."
"The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature."
"The product has helpful local technical support."
"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 like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources."
"They have really thought through their solution. They've covered everything."
"The most valuable feature is the NVMe flash storage."
"We use a platform as a service and have multiple application vendors who comprise that platform. There are moments when those application vendors put the blame on us. By working in InfoSight, I am able to say, "No, it is not us." I can actually provide proof, either by using screenshots or through reporting."
"The valuable features include encryption of data, hybrid performance, firmware updates, and overall simplicity."
"The setup was very, very simple. When we got our AF5000, no kidding, we had it up in production within two hours"
"Good architecture and produces a lot of IOPS."
"The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies."
"We get storage access without the need for more human monitoring of those resources."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room. We want to be able to read through the encryption."
"It is a bit expensive."
"I would like to migrate to the cloud in the future and know how that would actually work with this product."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would like the ability to swap out the network adapters into it. So, without taking out the whole controller, I would like to be able to swap adapters. This would make things easier."
"I would like to see a Nagios monitoring plugin which watches the health and performance of the system. The only one available just checks volume capacity."
"It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual."
"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."
"The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing."
"The product’s pricing should be improved."
"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."
"It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity."
"There is an issue with data duplication occurring on the flash memory. It should be improved. Timely updates and upgrades to the latest versions would be great."
"Include cloud-based replication for blocks"
"The solution could reduce its price."
"I would like to see native network attached storage (NAS) functionality. Our customers are looking for NAS, and Nimble can't give it to them."
"In the future, I would like to see a lower-end model that has Peer Persistence functionality."
"Web GUI should be HTML5."
"The large hardware components may be difficult to fit into some standard racks."
"There is no active-active controller, which means that we can only have one controller online at a time."
"I would like to have more administrative rights, for example, root-level administrative rights to the underlying OS of the storage array. We want more access to the kind of underlying infrastructure of the storage array rather than relying on support. However, most companies are looking to have more managed solutions which is the opposite direction of what I want."
"We have had some stability issues with one array which has happened twice during subsequent software updates but is due to a bad Postgres database."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 29 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 15 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Price / Quality ratio is good and since OE 5.03 code the array family reached a rather good maturity level". On the other hand, the top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage writes "A tool that offers protection against ransomware and other enterprise-level attacks". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and VMware vSAN, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN, NetApp AFF and IBM FlashSystem. See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
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