Dell Unity XT Unified Storage vs. SolidFire (discontinued)

Dell EMC Unity is an easy system and very flexible component and very easy to navigate while providing effective services and management of multiple project information management and the data pulling from the supported third-party platform is easy and quick. Excellent reporting features and easy to use and the analytics tools are amazing.

Incentivized

Solidfire is a good, multi-purpose array for iSCSI environments. Grid architecture allows incremental, linear expansion of the array both in capacity and performance. The all-flash is a very high performance, low latency platform for a lot of applications. The way the company has architected the platform allows for continual upgrades and removes the lift-and-load replacements if you stay with Solidfire in the future. The Solidfire fiber channel implementation is workable, but largely there is a checkbox. I cannot imagine any fiber channel shop is going to look at a Solidfire seriously, unless they are looking to move towards Ethernet based transport. Write intensive workloads struggle on the array. The double-helix data protection combined with the architecture can make writes more latent than expected - well into the teens and 20's of ms within the array.

Incentivized

• Enables you to create multiple copies of any database.
• Data savings feature with compression.
• Integrity with VMWare, RHEL, Oracle.
• The best option is a midrange unified storage array in a customer environment.
• Some models support NMMe.
• Copy Data Management (iCDM), Data-At-Rest-Encryption (D@RE).

Incentivized

• Speed is incredible.
• Ongoing maintenance is great.
• Price point was quite good.

Incentivized

• Alerting: receiving an alert when an issue occurs. That is good to know. However, if the alert is cleared, or somehow no longer in alarm, no email is received. At times I will receive the email alert on weekends, not knowing if the issue is resolved or not until Monday when I can access the unit. I have learned in most instances, the alert is a false alarm, which could be a problem.
• The alerting itself is sometimes not clear. For example, it tells me the link is down, we reset the connection, the link is still down, a tech was dispatched, he troubleshot, and finally the alarm cleared. This incident took almost a week. It went back into alarm after he left, then suddenly it cleared on its own.

Incentivized

• API documentation could use some help
• GUI can be slow

Incentivized

Very cumbersome compared to other vendors in the same marketplace.

Incentivized

Not only support for Unity, but for any Dell product, whether for companies or for the end consumer. Support is agile, helpful, and always focused on solving the problem. To date, there has been no problem that Dell's support has failed to resolve and help us with.

Incentivized

When we have had problems, the response on the Solidfire side has been strong, but not perfect. As they scale and integrate into NetApp, support from regions outside of the USA are having a more difficult time diagnosing and addressing issues for complex problems. The Boulder, CO, and Raleigh, NC, support teams are both extremely strong and provide top-notch support. ActiveIQ is a great support tool both for NetApp/Solidfire and for the customer. The proactive support tickets opened have been helpful. The node-based support has been excellent - meaning when we had a DIMM fail, they sent a replacement node - no time consuming troubleshooting of internal components to fix the issue. Upgrades are handled by SF technicians, so it feels white-glove

Incentivized

I was instructed to buy these arrays, but I was not given the opportunity to evaluate other arrays. We evaluated other products in the market that competed with Unity and found that the younger array built from scratch had far better features, software, and ease of use. The Unity system has a unique way of storing the data when compared with other systems.

Incentivized

SolidFire was chosen over these other service providers because of relationships we have with the company, with our reps, and with the local Denver presence. We also are a partner, and we felt that the solution stacked up technologically very well against the competition and was more cost effective.

Incentivized

• Less business downtime and reliability is a major business concern. DELL EMC UNITY addresses this concern well and provides robust storage.
• Investing in UNITY system is less expensive than all-flash storage systems.
• Managing and provisioning VMware disks became simpler from a single interface in the Vcenter

Incentivized

• The ROI was quick - under 1 year

Incentivized