We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series 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.
"The ease of use. That's what our customers love. They say it's very easy, they don't need special training, they don't need to call us or any other company or integrator to help them do their job. That's the main reason they purchase Pure."
"The management is simple in Pure Storage FlashArray."
"Redundancy and the fault tolerance of the platform are the most impressive."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"All updates, upgrades, and hardware work are all performed on-line with no impact."
"Their technical support is excellent. It's the best out of any of the vendors we work with."
"For us, the most valuable feature is the compression and deduplication. Being able to deploy a three to one ratio for storage is absolutely critical in today's world with the growing need for storage and the growing need for more space."
"It is easy to manage overall. It is all web-based. It has a an easy, nice dashboard. I receive emails if there are issues. When there are any updates, I receive emails. I can either do them on my own, but normally I schedule them with Dell EMC and they remote in, then it's done."
"They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"It is ease to use. It performs. It's easy to provision, and It's stable."
"It is easy to manage. Managing it, I get alerts if there are any type of issues. I had a hard drive go bad, which had never caused any issues. Dell EMC contacted me, and said, "We are a shipping a new one out." My response was, "Why?" He told me that hard drive was bad. So, I went and looked, and it was. This was almost immediate. I never even knew anything had happened."
"Inline data reduction is pretty impressive."
"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."
"This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up."
"Last year, I did a DM Series installation with my colleague, and this installation was effortless because we had Lenovo support on the phone, so it was easy to get help if we had any problems."
"The product’s quality of service guarantees the performance of each workload."
"The FlexClone feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"Scalable and stable storage array."
"The most valuable feature of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its capability to tier to the cloud, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS. Additionally, the integration is good and they are user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of the Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is its ability to store data well."
"The solution offers very good reliable systems and storage for our clients."
"We are satisfied with the stability."
"I would like some performance analytics which go deeper than today. It should be specific to some hosts and applications. This would be good."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"The time-to-market could be better at times, but I think that's true for all vendors of hardware."
"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."
"Having something native in the Pure Storage ecosystem would make it integrated and in one single company, and we wouldn't have to work with multiple organizations."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that."
"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."
"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."
"The storage processors have less port expansion than previous high-end VNX arrays. Data compression is only available in all-flash pools."
"Unity only does compression. It would be nice if there was a deduplication feature as well. At my previous job, we used XtremIO and that was deduplication and not compression, and I think we got more out of it because the more OSs you have that are the same, the fewer copies it needs to keep of all that data. So, the deduplication would be a nice feature to have."
"Scalability of this solution could be improved."
"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say the deduplication part, because for large deduplications, you need an extra appliance to do it in order to avoid having problems in performance. I think that could be improved, because everything should be included in the product, not with an appliance from the outside."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The solution needs a simpler licensing theme around the DM series. The problem is if you only need one of the features, you still have to buy the whole thing. The licensing needs to be more granular or flexible so you have the option to only license FlexCone or Inline Compression features."
"It takes a very long time to enter the management console, as well as to restart the system, and these are things that should be improved."
"I would like Lenovo to add a feature like IBM Easy Tier to DM Series. This is a crucial feature for the customers."
"I would rate the support of Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series a four out of five."
"Many people do not realize that Lenovo has a storage solution, so better marketing from the vendor is needed."
"The Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series was very hard to configure. Installation of the product was very hard. These are its areas for improvement."
"The licensing model needs to be revisited. It needs to be simplified."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is ranked 21st in All-Flash Storage with 10 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is rated 7.4. 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 Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series writes "Simple deployment, stores data well, but missing features". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, whereas Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series is most compared with NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, Dell PowerStore, IBM FlashSystem and NetApp FAS Series. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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