Dell Unity XT vs HPE Alletra Storage comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and HPE Alletra Storage 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.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage Report (Updated: June 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage

June 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Featured Reviews

JamesBrooks

Infrastructure Engineer at ISAM

Jul 12, 2022

Problem free scalability, reliable, with straightforward setup

It has good, reliable, and fast storage. We really like snapshot features and how automatable and programmable it is. It is all managed with ad sport and playbooks We have been using Pure FlashArray X NVMe for about a year now. Scalability has been great. We have run into a couple of instances…

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Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jan 16, 2023

Price / Quality ratio is good and since OE 5.03 code the array family reached a rather good maturity level

The uemcli is not an object-oriented CLI and the more object-rich PowerCLI has been discontinued. Only people with bash experience possibly can operate it. Still, nowadays, feeding object from one command into another is still a burden with such CLI. When adding a few disks to a cluster, the CLI is actually standing in the queue for one disk to be added to all, requiring multiple scans on each member host, before proceeding with the second and scanning all hosts once again. One could add all disks at once and stand in the queue once for a rescan all. There isn't a means to add volume groups or host groups. A feature that any solution I worked with so far has. It's a burden to assure each host has the same LUN ID on each host in this manner. As of the June 2021 release, code OE 5.1, seems to offer the option to have host groups in the end! ===> Review 01/2023: Unity OE 5.1 came out with the notion of a host group The integration with vCenter comes with a side effect, in that it will take control of the vSphere scan process, moreover, every esx host is scanned multiple times. It takes easily a few hours to add a few LUNS to a few hosts. This is rather painful. Even when adding LUNs using the Unisphere GUI, you can keep up with the pace of your script. Support Responsiveness and time to fix bugs should be improved. Over the past 1.5 years, we had occasional controller reboots and we went all the way from OE 4.5 over 5.02 to 5.03, 5.1, and 5.2.1, and eliminated the most common causes. We still face a stress-triggered cache merge issue and though we provided the dumps and engineering acknowledged the bug, it has been told that addressing the bug requires substantial code rewriting and the problem will be fixed in the next major code release (OE 6.x). We are now two years later, still no fix, but fortunately, face the condition occasionally, and among even other bug checks. ===> Review update 01/2023 There was also a problem of a Storage Processor Panic condition that could unveil after uptime in days had been reached. We had two such crashes and the uptime of our five units (ten controllers) showed they all bypassed the uptime, which had the potential to even crash the remaining eight controllers. Without much explanation on the cause (Typical at Dell EMC), it seems like a memory leak issue to me. We decided to reboot them all as a quick reply and later on to patch them on a more convenient maintenance window. It was only until this summer that the issue is known and formalized to the public and listed as DTA 205836: Dell Unity: Storage Processors Running 5.1.X Code May Panic After 275-300 Days of Runtime (User Correctable) All Unity systems running Unity Operating Environment (OE) version 5.1.X, but primarily Unity XT systems (480, 680, or 880, including F models), may experience SP panics after 275-300 days of runtime.

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Yosef Emiru

System Engineer at Kenera International Trading PLC

Apr 17, 2024

Simple to manage, stable and offers high speed for transferring data

My experience with it has been good. I primarily use it as a storage backend for my applications. I like it for that purpose It's been important for automating some of our workloads. For example, we had some heavy processes that would sometimes crash. Alletra has made managing those easier. I…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"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."

"It has good, reliable, fast storage."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"It's a much smaller footprint than our older storage arrays, which take up some six tiles, a lot of space in the data center. The Unity's are a lot smaller, and they're a lot faster."

"It's easy to use, easy to manage, easy to troubleshoot, and the process support is good."

"For sites that we use it on, it gives us more flexibility and high availability solutions. It is easier to expand the site, if needed."

"We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

"We use it to implement all our VDI solutions."

"We just started doing a bunch of automation where, if an end-user's home directory or departmental share gets filled, I can set certain things through a Unity API so that if it reaches 95 or 98 percent full, it will automatically expand. Now, instead of our getting a ticket and having to go in and do it manually, it does that for us."

"It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs."

"We were able to integrate it very quickly with other solutions."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"The tool's notable feature is that we don't need to log a case directly with the vendor. The tool has access to all the logs on-premises. This is an on-premises solution. Additionally, we can provision data as thick or thin provisioned. Moreover, it includes data grid duplication and compression features."

"It offers rich features and high speed for transferring data."

Cons

"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"In terms of what needs improvement, the dashboard and management could be simplified."

"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."

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."

"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"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."

"The upgrade process needs improvement. I should be able to swap it out, with zero downtime, with another array, down the road. I don't think Dell EMC has anything in the roadmap for this product line. I just don't want to have to deal with that anymore and all of our customers are pretty much the same."

"I would like better monitoring capabilities: more historical data with more insight into the performance for the database. We now use a separate tool for it. Therefore, it would be nice if we could have that straight from the tool."

"The initial setup is not so straightforward if you don't have experience with storage arrays."

"It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers."

"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."

"As the solution continues to grow and gain more traction, things will come up that will just continue to deepen the integration between VMware, vCenter, and all those other components. Anything in the divisibility there and additional tools is always great."

"Stability is the problem. We've had stability issues with it. We've had problems with the iSCSI interface. We've had it for two years now and for two years we've had problems where a service processor will drop, we'll lose connectivity to LUNs, we'll lose connectivity to the storage, issues like that. No matter how we've tried to chase it down, everybody just points fingers at each other. The only thing that changed in our environment was that the Unity solution was installed."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"It would be better if there were an option to incorporate the NVMe feature alongside other storage tiers. Currently, the system operates on Autotier but can manually peer and mix different types of drives, such as SAS and SATA drives."

"We had some issues while installing it on our servers. It required more resources while cross-checking. So, the initial setup process could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"The product is expensive."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government."

"The price of Dell Unity XT is reasonable. However, if you are buying a custom solution, it can come at a considerable price."

"We checked both HP and Dell and we determined that Dell EMC was a better option."

"All the licenses are included from day one of your purchase of the product, so you don't have to buy licenses separately. There are no additional costs to be paid for the maintenance of the solution."

"This solution is a good price for what you get."

"We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties."

"Looking at it based on cost per gigabyte, it's certainly very effective."

"Most licenses for the solution are free but upgrades are available when adding additional software or storage."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"There is a license. HPE Alletra uses a cloud-based model."

"The solution is expensive and can cost around five lakhs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Educational Organization

67%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

20%

Government

10%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

The tool's pricing is higher than competitors.

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can reco...

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What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

They’re both great solutions and I’ve used both. EMC is being VERY aggressive on pricing which may be the undoing of...

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What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance. I will sh...

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What do you like most about HPE Alletra?

It offers rich features and high speed for transferring data.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Alletra?

There is a license. HPE Alletra uses a cloud-based model. This means I'm focused on procuring on-demand resources for...

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Alletra?

We had some issues while installing it on our servers. It required more resources while cross-checking. So, the initi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 21% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 9% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 38% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 13% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 9% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 6% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 4% of the time

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Dell PowerStore vs HPE Alletra Storage

Compared 33% of the time

HPE Primera vs HPE Alletra Storage

Compared 19% of the time

HPE 3PAR StoreServ vs HPE Alletra Storage

Compared 7% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs HPE Alletra Storage

Compared 7% of the time

Huawei OceanStor Dorado vs HPE Alletra Storage

Compared 3% of the time

More HPE Alletra Storage Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

June 2024

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

June 2024

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

June 2024

Download HPE Alletra Storage product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

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Learn More

Pure Storage

Dell Technologies

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

HPE Alletra offers high-performance storage solutions for enterprise environments, ideal for mission-critical applications like data analytics, AI/ML workloads, VDI, and cloud-native applications.

Users praise its exceptional performance, reliability, scalability, and ease of use, highlighting its ability to enhance storage efficiency and improve data center performance. It has proven to increase efficiency, productivity, sales, and customer satisfaction for organizations.

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Accenture, Aetna, AIG, Airbus, Allianz, American Express, ATT, Bank of America, Barclays, BASF, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Comcast, Credit Suisse, Dell, Deutsche Bank, ExxonMobil, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Google, HSBC, IBM, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Kroger, L'Oreal, Merck

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage

June 2024

Free Report: Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage and other solutions. Updated: June 2024.

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See our Dell Unity XT vs. HPE Alletra Storage report.

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