We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE Nimble Storage based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Dell EMC Unity XT has a slight edge in this comparison due to the higher marks it received for its scaling abilities.
"We like the data reduction rates. That has been really helpful. You get 4U of Pure storage replacing something like two racks of spinning disks. One of the things that has contributed to that are the data reduction rates."
"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."
"We are very happy with the data deduplication and compression ratio that we have on the platform."
"Its array houses our entire production environment."
"The most valuable feature of Pure Storage FlashArray is the all-flash storage performance, low latency, and efficiency of their de-duplication technology. Additionally, the ease of use is good compared to other storage systems. The features in data protection, snapshotting, and replication between data centers and sites are superior to other solutions."
"The availability and ease of use are the big features."
"Data deduplication features make it easier to manage storage and forecast growth."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive."
"One of the things that I like the most about it is how they have changed the Unisphere GUI, and how it is now HTML5. It is so easy to use. Also, the array itself is so simple, easy to set up and easy to use, but it still has that great Dell EMC technology behind it."
"We can put all the virtualized servers in one place, so our customers can share and manage the devices very easily."
"Initial setup is a simple process."
"It is very stable."
"Setup is simple."
"The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."
"I use InfoSight quite a bit. It works well. It allows you to get some insight into what's happening in your environment immediately, instead of having to send things off and having them analyzed and sent back to you."
"InfoSight is helpful because it is proactive support."
"We like the performance."
"Not only is it high performing, but it is also more compact and fits better in our storage arrays than equipment from other storage providers."
"I have added expansion shelves on several of them. It is simple to do. You plug it in, you attach two cables, then you press one button, like "Add", and that is all you have to do."
"Deduplication and compression."
"It has allowed us to upgrade our DMS to the latest version and reuse the older array as the DR storage for VMware SRM."
"Its speed, ease of use, and it has been completely reliable."
"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."
"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."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"We have not seen a reduction in our TCO nor have we seen ROI."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"The number of Filesystems is limited, which it is not on the EMC VNX."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"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."
"Dell EMC's competitor has a clustering technology. In the next release, it would be nice if they could build that into the product."
"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."
"There is no de-duplication. Unity used to be Bionics, which had de-duplication; however, in Dell Unity XT, the de-duplication was deprecated and is no longer available."
"Dell Unity XT’s price needs improvement."
"Thick provisioning of LUNs."
"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."
"Licensing has been quite difficult. It doesn't always auto-license. About half the time, when I provision one, I have to contact Service to get a license, or even go to our account manager to help get it straightened out."
"When sizing the array based on requirements the option to add more network cards for throughput would be something to help clients."
"I want it to be an active-active array. Nimble would be great as an active-active array because then everything checks out. It would give a feeling of comfort."
"The solution needs to be an active-active controller."
"You could argue that it would be preferable if everything were cheaper in order to save taxpayer money."
"The solution’s stability could be better. The tool’s pricing is high and depends on the partner."
"I think the scalability of HPE Nimble Storage could be improved."
"The solution could reduce its price."
"The only thing that I can really compare Nimble to is all-flash because, right now, Nimble is a hybrid solution. I would like to see them come out with an all-flash alternative."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 186 reviews while HPE Nimble Storage is ranked 5th in All-Flash Storage with 117 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while HPE Nimble Storage is rated 9.0. 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 HPE Nimble Storage writes "Beneficial management software, straightforward installation, and good support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, IBM FlashSystem, HPE 3PAR StoreServ and Dell PowerMax NVMe, whereas HPE Nimble Storage is most compared with Dell PowerStore, HPE Primera, VMware vSAN, IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF. See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Nimble Storage report.
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