We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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."It simplifies the overall management. We don't have to worry about storage anymore."
"The ease of management is one of the most valuable features of this solution. I would have also said that it's pretty fast but now our SQL servers are starting to beat it up pretty bad."
"Pure is simple to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis."
"The speed is one of the most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray."
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"It comes with a large number of features out-of-the-box, which makes it easy for us to see problems and manage capacity."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"It is scalable. Customers are going more into distributed architecture, so the Unity definitely has a scalable architecture built into that."
"We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us."
"Veeam Backup integration: Veeam is the defacto standard for backing up of virtual environments."
"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 great because it can work as a SAN and net storage."
"The storage management is superb, with a user-friendly graphical interface and dashboards. The performance is good. The integration, dashboards, and analytics are excellent. It gives me immediate output and quick access to the reports I need promptly. It's an excellent product with high stability. The solution is scalable. The support team is highly supportive, responsive, and efficient in providing solutions. This product is highly useful and well-suited for all types of automation."
"The most valuable features are its performance and simplicity."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"The storage features are valuable."
"Over the eight years, we've been using NetApp with ONTAP, we've never lost a bit of data, and we've only experienced a few minutes of downtime in that entire time."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is easier to use than some other solutions and the UI is very good to use for day-to-day activities. Overall, the solution has good technology."
"During the use cases of the solution, its reliability and suitability are the best."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a product that is fast and provides a fast I/O."
"The most valuable features are stability and performance."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"It needs to improve its price."
"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."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I would like to see support for NVMe, end-to-end."
"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"The 3PAR SSD arrays that we have are still failing a lot so even though we're under warranty, we still have to get someone out and usually have someone troubleshoot so that usually adds onto the cost. With Pure, we've had a disc fail and we pop it out and you pop it in and it's good to go."
"Pricing could be better in comparison to other solutions."
"There are some features in VNX that I wish were in the Unity. For example, Storage Groups for isolating LANs and hosts. That is a big issue."
"What I'd like to see is a little more detail on the networking side. I can go into where it's showing me the replication, but when I go into the network it just gives me broad-based information. I don't know which replication job is actually feeding it. I have to go in and rely on other apps."
"My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"It could always use native replication. Then I could get rid of RecoverPoint."
"Inline dedup compression security is coming up as an issue, encryption, etc. is key for our customers. If we could have more ways to do software-based encryption, those are the features customers are asking us for, as well as replication."
"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 haven't seen the roadmap for this solution."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
"Sometimes, it takes a while to get somebody competent on the other end of the line. They do have engineers in multiple time zones around the world. However, their level-one support is not always the best."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is ranked 17th in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp NVMe AFF A800 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 NVMe AFF A800 writes "Very easy to manage, highly stable and offers robustness of the CLI, API, and GUI ". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas NetApp NVMe AFF A800 is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and Dell PowerMax NVMe. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp NVMe AFF A800 report.
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