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."The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."
"The initial setup was very straightforward and very quick. It was up and running in our data center within 24 hours of receiving it."
"The tool has reduced our power consumption."
"The predictive performance analytics are good."
"It is easy to manage. You don't have to have the same people who used to manage the Dell EMC arrays because the solution is more intuitive."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the complete set of functions it provides."
"This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain."
"The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature."
"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."
"It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs."
"The technical support is very professional and provides quick responses."
"The fact that it's hybrid is the most valuable feature. We have the SSD so we put our SharePoint on there and some of the stuff that requires a little more speed. For SharePoint, we want the pages to respond a little more quickly. And it's nice to be able to use the slower storage for stuff that we don't need as quickly, like file servers."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"Compared to older generations of arrays there is quite an improvement, compared to the older VNXs, for example. It depends on you use it, but for our purposes, we find Unity simple to use."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"The high availability is very good."
"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."
"It is a bit expensive."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"I would like to see more cloud integration."
"In the next version of this program, I would like to see increased security, higher encryption, and faster throughput."
"I would like to see the NAS add-on component become more fault-tolerant than just a single virtual machine running inside the array. I'm unwilling to use it for that reason."
"I want to learn more about command line usage which I have not explored much yet. However, there are many automated solutions for repetitive tasks. I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring of alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds in the next release."
"Just some nit picky stuff, like allowing servers and volumes to be grouped. Therefore, it would easier to work with them in the GUI."
"We need to add more storage in Pure Storage FlashArray with the cluster mode activated for us to have better performance."
"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 uses of tools to communicate with EMC directly. With EMC, I am not able to connect and resolve issues without assistance, so they can't do unattended maintenance on devices, which would be a massive benefit if they could."
"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."
"There is an issue with data duplication occurring on the flash memory. It should be improved. Timely updates and upgrades to the latest versions would be great."
"It would be better if there were more integrations."
"There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide."
"The solution can use improvement with the patch cluster like the Synchron and Active replication."
"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."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"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 186 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM FlashSystem and HPE Primera, 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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