We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp FAS Series 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."Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"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."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"The initial setup was extremely simple and straightforward."
"The latency is good."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"It's easy to manage. We access it and manage it through Unisphere and have had no issues. We're able to provision storage, create consistency groups, create RDMs for our virtual machines. Creating it through Unisphere, it automatically adds the data store on the VMware side and rescans the LUNS. We just have to add and configure the storage in one place and it takes care of everything, which is very handy."
"This solution makes it easy to manage storage, provision new workloads, and scale-up."
"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."
"User friendly interface"
"It is a workhorse and will run even demanding workloads."
"We currently have two Dell EMC Unities going. One of them at our primary on-premise DR site. They communicate with each other. If we ever have to failover, it is right there and ready."
"The most valuable feature is the dynamic cache of this product. It is very important. We have the physical cache and we can boost this cache using disks. All the products are mainly flash now and this is one of the main characteristics which our customers like."
"All-flash array eliminates all the overhead of tiering and a lot of the data structuring overhead involved."
"It's an easy product to use that is stable and has good performance."
"The new FAS series is a good fit for some customers. We have good performance and capacity, even though it is full flash."
"The tool's most valuable features are ease of use, ease of access, expandability, availability, and performance. NVMe drives have improved their performance."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Data consolidation and visualization."
"I like the unified management feature because sometimes you end up running a single protocol on the entire system."
"The support is very good."
"The strong point is that our clients like this are RadLV (Radiology Low-Value). They also use SnapMirror and MetroCluster."
"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."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"They could add more support for file storage and different types of storage."
"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."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"If there's anything Dell EMC could do to get the same performance for a cheaper price, that would be great."
"It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say its capacity and its connection."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of the backup procedures."
"We've also encountered an issue when it comes to migrating to compressed LANs on the Unity, and during the Storage vMotion. It appears that the compression algorithm is overwhelmed, and when it becomes overwhelmed it just stops compressing and writes the raw data to the destination. We later copied internally another Storage vMotion to another compressed LAN and achieved much higher compressions on that internal copy. It would be really nice if there was a way to automatically throttle, as a part of a Storage vMotion, to say, "I want to gain the maximum benefits from the compression algorithm, so throttle back the Storage vMotion to implement 100 percent compression.""
"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."
"NetApp FAS Series could improve by being more secure."
"Its operating system is very cumbersome. However, after you set it up, it runs pretty smoothly. Its file system is not very dynamic. It is very static."
"The high cost of the product is an area of concern, so from an improvement perspective, the tool needs to be made cheaper."
"The solution can improve on the replication features."
"The adoption of flash by NetApp has also been lagging behind the trendsetters, like TMS, Nimble, and others."
"Replication should ideally be part of the ONTAP base bundle."
"Needs to add wizards for newer, inexperienced users."
"NetApp FAS Series should introduce an FTP application for the broadcast and post-production market."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while NetApp FAS Series is ranked 5th in Deduplication Software with 98 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp FAS Series 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 NetApp FAS Series writes "Offers good performance and ". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp FAS Series is most compared with Dell PowerScale (Isilon), NetApp AFF, HPE StorageWorks MSA, Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) and VAST Data. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp FAS Series report.
See our list of best All-Flash Storage vendors.
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