We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"Pure has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."
"Replication of the communication object (COB) scenarios"
"The most valuable feature is the integration with vCenter."
"There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy."
"After migration to Unity 300F, we were able to put more DBs on flash, reducing latency. The results were visible in the front-end systems, and all users noticed the improvement."
"For our customers, it's the simplicity of it. They find it easy to use, along with the added features, the dynamic volumes."
"I have found Dell EMC Unity XT to be stable."
"Dell EMC Unity XT has good integration with VMware."
"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is its support of protocols for both block, and file levels. It has the features a store solution should have."
"I would rate this solution an eight plus. It has has good flexibility and stability, it's easy to manage and the response time is good."
"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."
"It has also helped to simplify storage for us in the way that it's easy to manage. Their automatic monitoring really helps when things break or are about to break. They see a problem coming and alert us even before our own system does."
"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."
"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."
"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."
"The product is scalable and easy to expand."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"The software layer has to improve."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"We need better data deduplication."
"Right now, the box itself is just strictly working as a backend storage system. It would be fantastic if we could access it directly like a NAS device through network access or SIS drives. I think they have an interface, but I am not sure how good it is. If we could address a box directly on the network without having to go through a server, it would be great. The replication schemas could be improved. We are not using replication on the storage level right now. We use a different type of replication. If their replication would be as good as the one that we have, I would probably run the replication schema because it might be faster, but I don't know that for a fact. So, I cannot say that they have good replication. All I can say is that they need to inform us better."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"My only complaint would be some of the CLI Help files could be a little more detailed, but that's very minor complaint. We were trying to run some commands just to see how the storage snaps were interacting with the storage array, and it was a little difficult to look up exactly what commands should be run. The Help files detailing what exactly the commands did wasn't as detailed as we would have wanted them to be."
"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."
"Scalability for the 650F is good, but I was expecting a little bit more."
"They should update to the cloud."
"The price of this product can be more cost-effective."
"We would like to see more advanced integration capability added to this solution."
"This product lacks deduplication and compression at the current version 4.1.0. LACP is not available for iSCSI either."
"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."
"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."
"They need better integration with public clouds along with a better hybrid solution."
"I would like to see better integration."
"I would like to see more VM-Aware features in the next release of this solution."
"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."
"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."
"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."
"File storage needs a lot of improvement. Mainframe connectivity also needs improvement because it requires additional components to be integrated with Pure Storage FlashBlade. If you want to keep your backup data, then this becomes an even more expensive solution because Pure Storage FlashBlade will not be able to meet your backup needs."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while Pure Storage FlashBlade is ranked 16th in All-Flash Storage with 31 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while Pure Storage FlashBlade 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 Pure Storage FlashBlade writes "A high-performing and scalable solution that improves data performance for S3 workloads". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas Pure Storage FlashBlade is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), VAST Data, MinIO and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Dell Unity XT vs. Pure Storage FlashBlade report.
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