We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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."Technical support has been helpful and responsive."
"The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use."
"The latency is good."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."
"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."
"It has a very intuitive web console that runs in HTML5 and makes navigation and administration fairly easy."
"Unity's are more easily administrated, so we need fewer people to do the administration. We have less overhead because of that."
"The way it takes the Snaps, that is one of the best features. Snapshot performance is what is key in the Unity, compared to a traditional VNX."
"Their support cases are all handed through the portal. The support contacts me when they need to do upgrades. It has been great. It's all very well-handled, scheduled, and performed."
"All-flash performance, Snapshotting capabilities and replication are all valuable features."
"We just recently started using the Dynamic Pools, so while it's scalable, we actually find it valuable that we can just pop in one or two drives when we need to, instead of having to add a whole RAID set. That has actually been very handy for us."
"Integration is easy with this product."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"Considering the cost, I find NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays to be the best storage available in the market."
"The management of it is very simple. that is the most valuable feature."
"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is its speed."
"Rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas."
"Having the option of such high-speed storage in the data center is what makes it valuable."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"The software layer has to improve."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"We've seen that when we create a POD in synchronous mode, it increases the latency."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"The EMC VNX Virtual Data Mover (VDM) software needs more improvement."
"We do a lot of VMware. It only integrates with VMware in one way, which is virtual volumes. I don't really have any visibility on anything else. From VMware, I can't look into Unity. From Unity, I can't look into VMware unless I am using virtual volumes, where they integrate together happily, but we are not using that. I would like better integration for non-virtual volume VMware use."
"The one thing that we would look at would be if they were to expand the file level features, just to give us a balance or a tier between it and Isilon options out there, for unstructured data."
"It could be a little easier to attach it to a network file system."
"The reporting should be better. In other systems, you can create many different kinds of reports but this is not the case with Dell."
"We have had some downtime. Nothing is perfect. Unity’s have had some code-release problems, versions that, from a compatibility perspective, had some glitches which caused an outage. But, given the amount of Unity’s we run, that has been fairly minor and it hasn't happened at scale or across all of our Unity’s."
"I haven't seen the roadmap for this solution."
"The monitoring part could be better. With EMC storage systems - or Unity and VPLEX, because I'm using them, for the moment - the monitoring part is very difficult. They should improve this to have a better reporting system."
"This solution has limited storage."
"Things like the FlexClones, SnapVault, SnapMirror, all of that. Some of it's available on the EF series, but we like what we have in the FAS system."
"The initial setup phase of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is not straightforward and needs improvement."
"A little more manageability, a simpler management interface. It's not necessarily that it's way overly complex. It's just that it's not as easy as the FAS series."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"There could be better integration with some of our Cisco products."
"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."
"Better support technicians for CAPP."
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Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6. 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 EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and IBM FlashSystem, whereas NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera. See our Dell Unity XT vs. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays report.
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