We performed a comparison between Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC Unity XT based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: The two products received similar reviews in most categories. According to reviews, Dell EMC PowerStore appears to be a bit more robust and therefore more appropriate for larger environments.
"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The latency is good."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"Offers excellent features like efficient data reduction, a reliable SafeMode, and a great support model for continuous assistance and updates."
"It is very easy to use. Access is very friendly. It shows you a lot of important information at the first glance. It has been very easy to use."
"The PowerStore's compression ratio is even higher than the Unity system."
"The compression is excellent."
"For access from virtual machines, iSCSI, and NFS, it is very good. It helps increase performance."
"It provides a big benefit when upgrading a new VMware environment. For example, in a big environment with 10 to 30 ESXs, you can take everything and put that into PowerStore. So, it is cost-effective, which is very important and has been massive for us. You reduce almost 80% from the hardware and work directly from PowerStore. Building hardware, especially in a big VMware environment, is a big issue for my organization."
"The solution is very easy to implement."
"The simplicity and ease of use have been very valuable features. I have a very small team, and only half of the team is well versed in the HP product. Whereas if I bring PowerStore in, everyone can learn it because it will be new on the floor."
"The main feature of Dell PowerStore is its support for NVMe as well as hybrid solutions."
"It's unified, it does block and file, so that is pretty important to my customers who might have file servers around their environment. I can roll them all up into a single array, as well as provide block storage for them on one array."
"It is lightning fast, low on power and heat, and has a small footprint with great performance."
"There has been no downtime. It has built-in redundancy upon redundancy."
"We run about 100 virtual servers on it. We have about 100 users accessing the file shares from there, and I've seen no problem with that. We have about a 10GB backbone. Whatever we throw at it, it hasn't shown any sign of weakness or anything. It's been really good."
"It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs."
"The performance is great. We have four or five different Unity arrays, and they have all run flawlessly."
"The Unisphere management interface: We are very familiar with it. It manages all the EMC devices that we have. Management is easy because it is part of Unisphere, which is self-learning."
"There are also DR and data protection functions that we found in the new Unity, now that we are stepping up from VNX and other storage appliances, that we've started implementing."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"The software layer has to improve."
"There is no Synchronize replication feature on the storage."
"There are certain shortcomings with the technical support team of Dell PowerStore, where improvements are required."
"We are happy with the service in general. The only thing would be the price of the platform."
"We would consider this solution if the pricing is competitive with other options, as it offers a very good solution. However, the current price is slightly higher than the competition."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"When it comes to Dell PowerStore, I would like to see more integration and more security features included. It's unfortunate that the solution does not feature Flash trace."
"It doesn't support SSD or Flash."
"It was very new when we first deployed it a year ago. Even the upgrade processes and knowing what to expect, as well as documentation, could be more robust."
"In future releases, I would like to see automatic upgrades from one to the next, when this system is coming out and the next one is coming in; more akin to what Pure Storage is doing. That would be really helpful."
"Scalability is not good. We have a Unity 300, now we have to do a data-in-place conversion for the next upgrade because only 150 slots are supported, not drives, only slots."
"It's an expensive solution, particularly for medium companies. One device costs about 30,000 euros. The support contract is quite expensive as well. We are currently looking for other lower-cost solutions."
"It might be nice to have more integrated features instead of having everything as a separate module, like the networking. The networking is attached separately in the back. It would be nice if that was more integrated with less ports."
"Issues with slow responses from the support team."
"VNX used to have some features that Unity still doesn't have. From that perspective, the progress is not that advanced."
"The support portal needs fixing. Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number."
"We had one incident with a memory leak that led to controller reboot. Although it had no impact, when such things happens the storage should be more aware of it, send alerts, and propose corrective actions."
Dell PowerStore is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage with 47 reviews while Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 190 reviews. Dell PowerStore is rated 8.6, while Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerStore writes "It has a very strong NAS that can support a lot of big, heavy environments". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". Dell PowerStore is most compared with IBM FlashSystem, NetApp AFF, Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerMax NVMe and Huawei OceanStor Dorado, whereas Dell Unity XT is most compared with NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray, IBM FlashSystem and HPE 3PAR StoreServ. See our Dell PowerStore vs. Dell Unity XT report.
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We monitor all All-Flash Storage reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Hello Yasin,
The best solution depends upon your host environment. In general, PowerStore is more powerful than Unity but Unity is also a very good Storage solution.
The Unity 400 is a rather old, a much less powerfull solution and at its best holds ssd flashdrives if at all. Currently you have the Unity 8xx model, which has more CPU punch and therefore maxes out less fast on CPU utilisation. What this means is that you can add more shelves and disks and workloads to it before you hit the roof.
The powerstore 1200 is an nvme storage, is 60% more powerfull (compared to FC/SCSI-SSD on Unity) in our case, and has higher datareduction rates. If the unity reaches out to a datareduction rate of 1.5 or 2, the Powerstore T1200 is capable of 3 to 3.5 datareduction, probably due to half its blocksize. The price of the device is pretty much dependant on the price of its media, and therefore the Powerstore T1200 is the absolute winner.
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Another aspect is that the Powerstore can be used to build a cluster of arrays compared to the sync/asynch replication only feature of the Unity series, rendering the mirrored volumes unuseable unless one fails over to it, like in a disaster recovery scenario.
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The Powerstore also allows true A/A volumes on both sides . What this means is that one can build stretched vSphere clusters and the loss of your array in one site will still allow writing to the alternate protected disk, transparently ! You can have site local writes to your volumes and remain in sync without a need to cross site write.
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There is not much of a reason to settle for the Unity anymore, though some still prefer the Unity for NAS compared to Powerstore, but honestly speaking I won't recommend to use any of both for that purpose unless for limitted useage. Unity allocates RAM ressources dynamically when used for FC/SCSI AND NAS , whereas the Powerstore is initialized in a kind of split off of RAM ressources between NAS/FC SCSI at installation time. The ressource allocation is fixed and can't be altered lateron. Thats a hard call. So I'd favour the Unity only if you use it for low/moderate NAS needs in combination with FC/SCSI or block data and you don't have the budget nor the size to use a NAS optimised array on top.