Dell Unity XT hybrid flash arrays are storage systems for running general purpose workloads that do not require the low latencies and speed of all flash/NVMe architectures. Unity XT hybrid flash arrays balance performance, efficiency, features or outcomes.
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NetApp AFF A-Series
Score 8.7 out of 10
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NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays are the company's flagship flash storage solutions.
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.
Easy interface and the accessibility of the features are effective and this solution functionalities on data migration and processing of different from other packages is amazing. NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays is the most secure platform for easy management of all the business and project data and the capacity planning tools and even the configuration options are the best and easy to use.
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.
Our organizations primary storage platform is NetApp AFF-A900 nodes. All our storage requirements, be it storage visible to our compute either using FC or NFS is through these nodes. The shares or CIFS too are setup on these nodes. We also use the fabric pool to write the data to NetApps Storage Grid
Dell EMC Unity, in my honest opinion, is basically an all-flash VNX with a better interface. There is ZERO innovation coming out of EMC. If you want a company that's going to give you good support and be proud of their product instead of their profit margin, I strongly urge you to look elsewhere as there are better and more innovative products in the marketplace.
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.
I have been an IBM and EMC storage customer. I used EMC CX and VMX series SANs. I have used IBM Shark SANs before that. Much has changed over the years. It is my experience that Netapp has shown a great deal more innovation with large leaps in technology, ease of use and an aggressive progress while the two other vendors that I have experience with are more tied to their legacy technologies.