We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and SolidFire 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's extremely stable and has good performance."
"The security operating system is its most valuable feature because it's very simple, easy to use, and operate. You don't have to do very serious training to operate this equipment. It's user-friendly and pretty straightforward."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"It simplifies storage."
"The most valuable feature is its data reduction."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"The job of support for the storage engineers dramatically changed. We know more quickly the automation of the provisioning. We can now focus on things that bring more value to the company than just managing storage."
"We find the ease of usability and setup valuable."
"I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it."
"The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses."
"We use it to implement all our VDI solutions."
"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."
"The UI itself is fantastic, and the ease of administration is far better than Unisphere or Navisphere ever were. It's very easy to manage. The fact that it has built-in APIs means our automation people can help us automate a lot of tasks, and that has been helpful. And, of course, it's really fast. Obviously, that doesn't hurt anything at all."
"It is a stable solution that sells a lot...The deployment phase of the product was very easy."
"Provides good provisioning, allowing us to save space."
"Integration is easy with this product."
"Being able to provide quality of service as promised."
"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."
"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."
"SolidFire provides seamless performance across your storage system when you need to scale up. Other storage systems do not do that."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"SolidFire is one of the products that does have great APIs right out-of-the-box. It works great. The tools and the other stuff seem to work a little better right out-of-the-box than the ONTAP stuff does, C-Mode."
"The simplicity of it."
"They have a product, FlashBlade, which is their object storage integration, and that's something that we haven't integrated with yet. This might be an area for additional focus as it would play into scalability, because the very nature of object storage is that it's infinitely scalable."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"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."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"As partners, we should have the option to download the software, rather than have to go back through Pure to obtain it."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"Currently, the solution fails to support file screening."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"It's not as reliable as it should be, I think it was probably released a little early. We've had production problems with customers, and there are still some challenges at scale as well. Compression is a problem for the system. Once you enable dedupe and compression, the performance of the system, the capability, halves... It has to be right-sized and sized for compression, but even with that, because there are only two storage processors, you're ending up at almost 40 percent usage."
"The VNX reporting is much more granular, versus the Unity reporting."
"It should be lighter. It takes up a ton of rack space. It would be nice to have a smaller footprint."
"We did encounter a firmware bug which actually caused loss of data. There was some heartburn around that. But in general, it has operated as expected, except for that bug."
"We went to the PowerMax because of the needs that we have for the business. We're doing true enterprise-level storage. So we went from Unity to PowerMax to give us that tier that we were looking for."
"Improve the administrative user interface so it is easier to work with. Currently, a simple task, such as removing a host from 100 LUNS, takes a lot of time. If they could improve LUN to host model to be more like the EMC VPLEX, for example, it would be great."
"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."
"We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of the backup procedures."
"They could make the mNode more user-friendly. Now you need to configure and add nodes by CLI and it’s not really easy to manage. If they created a web interface to do the management of the mNode, that would be great!."
"One of the challenges we faced while using SolidFire was that the product line that we were using in our company was discontinued."
"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"For example, the ease of use with the reporting. Right now it's not impossible, but you have to know Sequel. It's a little time consuming to get those customized reports in there."
"It's a very good Windows-type solution. But we do a lot of legacy systems and the like. So it's getting that incorporated into it that would help us."
"We have a large fiber channel infrastructure, and that's one area that we haven't seen implemented in SolidFire, its more iSCSI."
"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while SolidFire is ranked 19th in All-Flash Storage with 33 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while SolidFire is rated 8.2. 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 SolidFire writes "A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ, whereas SolidFire is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore and VMware vSAN. See our Dell Unity XT vs. SolidFire report.
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