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 all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The data reduction technology part of the scalability has been impressive, like its ability to host additional workloads, volumes of data, and databases."
"The performance and the ever-growing maintenance are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"Very efficient storage"
"This solution has improved our organization. In the past, we had reports that were taking up to two hours and after switching to SSD storage the overall processing power dropped to half an hour. The end users saw an immediate performance gain."
"This is the best all-flash storage array on the market."
"Their support cases are all handed through the portal. The support contacts me when they need to do upgrades. It has been great. It's all very well-handled, scheduled, and performed."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"I like the idea that it can compress and dedupe inline. That is quite a stunning feature for mid-range customers."
"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 NAS capability is mainly what we're looking for from this product, and being able to recover fast in DR."
"The replication is big for us. We use file services on Unity and it has a really nice file services interface. It's also easy to manage. It's really easy in terms of provisioning, replication. There are no real tricks to it. It's just easy."
"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."
"Our upgrades are seamless. Whether we're adding storage, or upgrading the software, we don't take an outage for those upgrades."
"Nimble's phone-home capability is decent. The compression, dedupe, and caching are also solid. Generally, I like the simplicity. It's almost a set-and-forget solution."
"The most valuable feature is InfoSight, and the ability that InfoSight gives you, from insight within your environment to what is going on at the storage layer."
"Our virtual admins are able to take control of Nimble and know how to allocate the storage, whenever it is required, thus reducing time."
"This solution has given us reliability that is evident by the fact that it has been running for five years with virtually no hiccups."
"The tool’s support is feasible."
"The most valuable features are its cost-effectiveness, performance, and its deduplication deficiencies."
"The fact that you can manage the requirements is one the most valuable features of HPE Nimble Storage. The other is the rapid deployment time."
"In terms of the future, I have been excited by some of the copy data management stuff that they're talking about building into the environment. There are feature sets where I've done a lot of automation work. So, I am always looking forward to extensions of their API. They're also talking about a phone home centralized analytics database being used as a centralized management console with a list of new cloud features, but this doesn't seem finalized."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography."
"Beyond a certain amount of petabytes, you have to have a separate system. Basically, it's not infinitely scalable."
"We would like to see better troubleshooting aspects. It helps us if we can find out where the problem is. Right now, it's difficult. Sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint the issue. If they had more visibility and more troubleshooting feature built into the tool that would really help."
"It needs to improve its price."
"With scalability, I have run into a little problem with our last upgrade. There were some undocumented limitations to the number of drives that our controller could run on. So, instead of putting in a new data pack as we had anticipated, we had to keep adding and removing to get up to the capacity that we needed to be. What should have been a one day process (or a few hours) turned into a month and a half process."
"Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed."
"We cannot connect directly with Dell due to sanctions."
"I would like better integration with RecoverPoint. My major issue with the solution, all around, has been RecoverPoint more than Unity. While I like the easy user interface, I would like some more advanced features for troubleshooting built into the product, so that we can do more in-depth problem-solving."
"Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product."
"The pre-sales technical support and technical engagement could be made better for this product."
"I would like to see more integration with other products."
"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."
"They can certainly improve in terms of monitoring."
"We want to start storing data in the cloud really soon and we are looking at options."
"The dashboard can be improved."
"The solution needs to be an active-active controller."
"When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients."
"HPE Nimble Storage's cost is very high, making it one of its downsides."
"We are doing a hybrid and are moving some machines to Microsoft Azure to run in hybrid mode. We are checking the availability of extra software-defined storage so that we can configure it."
"The stability can be improved."
"HPE Nimble Storage could be improved with some critical application or servers."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 117 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0. 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 HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN, IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF. See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
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