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."The scalability is good."
"Data reduction and compression. Sub millisecond latency."
"It has been very stable. I have not seen or heard of downtime storage issues after moving over to it."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"Pure Storage is extremely reliable — it's never failed."
"I find two features of Pure Storage most valuable. The first is the "safe mode" function, and the second is its simplicity."
"We also like the compactness, the small footprint. It takes up very little space in a data center and uses little power."
"The most valuable feature is test performance. It helps us store large amounts of data along with providing us faster retrieval of data."
"It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNS. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy."
"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."
"Because I always need to trouble shooting for IOPS & database (DB) performance issues. I can quickly focus on what is part of the issue. I can decrease downtime and can plan next year's extended capacity budget."
"Stable flash storage platform with good scalability, efficiency, and speed."
"Via a click, we can deploy a data store or LUN to the ESX host. We can also deploy VVOLs to the ESX server."
"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."
"It is easy to scale, maintain, and manage."
"It's a much smaller footprint than our older storage arrays, which take up some six tiles, a lot of space in the data center. The Unity's are a lot smaller, and they're a lot faster."
"Low latency is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"We find the product to be very flexible."
"You can easily scale up, and scale-out."
"The storage features are valuable."
"The product can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally."
"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 most valuable features are stability and performance."
"Pure Storage will have issues with positioning in the near future since its a relatively new company. For now, customers need a PoC to trust using the solution, as it can't stand on its brand name alone. They need to improve Pure Storage's marketing."
"The higher education moves slowly. We are still looking forward to implementing the full list of existing features."
"We would like to integrate it more with our backup solutions."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"From a scalability perspective, it is a very small storage solution, so it's not very expandable."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"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."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"I would like to see better compression, better dedupe. It's not nearly as good as what is built into the XtremIO. I understand why that is the case, but if they can take some of that technology and leverage that a little bit better in the Unity array, that would be great."
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good."
"It could go faster. Make it bigger, better, and faster at a lower price, and I am there."
"This solution would be improved with the addition of flexible raid volumes."
"I'd like to see more of the NVMe back-end for the flash. And the big deal with the PowerMax is that they've used all U2 drives so that they can avoid having to take it down. I see using M.2 and modular sections as being a real nice alternative that could be implemented in Unity at a fairly low cost."
"It isn't easy to find trusted partners for the product. The solution has issues with mid-level storage and does not come with enterprise storage."
"This product has some scalability issues. Before you can get support, you have to look for the service tag number on your product which could make it difficult to access support."
"Stability is an area with a certain shortcoming where the solution needs to improve"
"The product's performance has some shortcomings, making it an area that could be a little better."
"Increasing the RAM, and including physical cords would be beneficial."
"The cost of the solution is quite high. It would be ideal if they could adjust it so that it's a but less."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The initial setup should be easier, and more like a plug-and-play approach."
"The product’s UI could be better."
"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."
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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