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.
"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are the management view of the solutions, ease of provision, and deprovision, it is fantastic."
"The stability of Pure Storage is very very good."
"The tool has reduced our power consumption."
"Running SAP on Pure Storage helps a lot without doing any further tuning to improve application performance. Our internal clients are happy."
"Provides fast access and is user-friendly."
"The best feature is consistently lower latency, even when IOPS crank up to over 75K. The product maintains submillisecond response time, which is incredible."
"The GUI is very easy to use and intuitive."
"The solution has probably reduced my power use substantially."
"With all-flash it should be able to scale. You probably just need one 4U device and you have terabytes of 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."
"It gives me the flexibility with its ability to replicate to itself and the ability to use the Dell EMC Cloud as an option. That's always sitting there and waiting if we need it."
"Unified block and file storage without the need of control stations and data movers. This simplifies administration and deployment and requires less rack space."
"The multiprotocol support. It's supporting NFS, fiber channel, CIFS, and these kinds of things. The multiprotocol is very attractive."
"It will certainly help us scale bigger. If I look at the footprint, the VNX's was multi-rack. Now, all of a sudden, we're only at a portion of a rack. And, obviously, if we can scale within the same rack - we can certainly see that by the number of hard drives we've had to put in - we can scale a lot more easily."
"I have had no problem at all. I think this is one of the most important things. It is very good. Maintaining it and deploying updates require very low maintenance. We haven't had problems. We had to replace a couple of disks in all these years, but it was pretty straightforward."
"It has the same operating system for both file and block, and it actually simplifies everything. And it's much smaller compared to VNX."
"The simplicity of it."
"Individual settings you can put on each individual volume, if you want to do that."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability."
"The square footage for doing development is at a premium when dealing with government networks. To be able to put a lot of IOPS in a lot of high-speed performing drives in a very small location which requires very little HVAC with very little power, it is very valuable to us."
"We can add a node, we add compute, we add storage, and we've had really good luck with that."
"It's got full API functionality and the performance is pretty steady."
"The most valuable feature is the performance, as well as how you manage performance on the system."
"It's a very compact device. For a medium-sized business, it's very helpful because the device is efficient and very fast."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"A minor issue that comes to mind is that, every once in a while, a hard drive will go bad."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve in the area of cryptographic information in the consoles. The user-friendliness could improve. The Pure Storage FlashArray team should come and log into the system with their maintenance credentials and then pull out the information as evidence of cryptography."
"I’d love to view the average, minimum and maximum performance in the reports (Analysis tab - Performance) but it is only graphics and you need to export data in CSV to find this information."
"Historical analytics would be useful. At the moment, they don't have any type of application built for historical analytics."
"The product should improve its response time. I have also encountered issues with its configuration."
"The solution could improve by having a multi-tenant feature."
"It needs to improve its price."
"We've got massive issues at the moment with IBM AIX. It's not stable. We have a lot of disk errors, production crashes sometimes."
"Licensing costs could be reduced."
"Software updates have to be downloaded to the root of the device. This pushes the available space to 95% utilization."
"It could always use native replication. Then I could get rid of RecoverPoint."
"There's always room for improvement with the UI. That can be a little cumbersome at times."
"Dell EMC Unity XT should present a path or a roadmap on how they could put their products on the cloud. This would have some value for their current customers."
"Ordering is easy, but the processing site and working with those companies was difficult."
"This is a tier-three solution and it gives us what we need for archiving and backups."
"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."
"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."
"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"I would like to see integration with the cloud, number one. Being able to spin SolidFire in the cloud."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."
"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."
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.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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