We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."It gives us capacity planning."
"The deduplication and compression meet all of our system requirements."
"We have seen savings in our storage. The speed of deployment has gone from several days to a few minutes. This product has reduced that time into minutes, simplifying storage for us."
"The deduplication in the array combined with its snap technologies allows the product to be remotely/manually controlled or scheduled."
"Because of the encryption, we have different storage and the encryption can go over both."
"Having fast storage allows actual servers to perform in high capacity so we don't have slowdowns on our applications."
"The solution offers amazing performance."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support."
"Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server."
"The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly."
"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."
"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."
"It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily."
"The most valuable features include snapshots, Thin Clones, and deduplication and compression."
"We are happy with the way we have Dell EMC Unity XT configured."
"It has compression, which allows you to store more data than you would normally under the arrays."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"The problem is that we can only make a few groups, around five or six groups. I like groups and we need a lot of them. We had to put all the information in only a few groups and cannot make a more detailed separation of them."
"I would rate this solution an eight. To make it a ten it would have to be a little cheaper."
"I would like to see them lower the costs."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"There are a lot of things to improve."
"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."
"A three wave application or multi wave application synchronization would be an improvement."
"I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution."
"The initial setup is not so straightforward if you don't have experience with storage arrays."
"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."
"We have had some downtime. Nothing is perfect. Unity’s have had some code-release problems, versions that, from a compatibility perspective, had some glitches which caused an outage. But, given the amount of Unity’s we run, that has been fairly minor and it hasn't happened at scale or across all of our Unity’s."
"We integrated it with vSphere but that integration was "iffy". It was okay but we had a few challenges with it."
"I think that they could do a better job of testing on the back-end, for the code revisions. I've heard of some issues down the line where people have upgraded to the latest code and there were bugs in it, and they had to release a subsequent code fix."
"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."
"You can't use every feature, because it costs in performance. Therefore, you have to choose which features to use to achieve a better environment. That is why customers do not use every feature in Unity."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 29 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 12 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp AFF.
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