Dell Unity XT Unified Storage vs. NetApp FAS Storage Arrays

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
NetApp's FAS series systems offers a storage array system for enterprises.N/A
Pricing
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Considered Both Products
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
We were directed to buy these arrays and didn't have the ability to evaluate the other arrays. Once we evaluated the other products in the market that compete with Unity we saw that the younger, more built from the ground up arrays, had much better features, software, and ease …
NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Chose NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Like most other unified solutions, NetApp excels in one particular area, unstructured data. Whilst it can, and does support the presentation of block-based volumes, I do not view it as a strong suit for NetApp. When comparing to other products, the two Unified products that I …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Enterprise Flash Array Storage
Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
9.3
15 Ratings
2% above category average
NetApp FAS Storage Arrays
-
Ratings
Flash Array Performance9.413 Ratings00 Ratings
Flash Array Integration9.413 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Compression9.712 Ratings00 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades8.815 Ratings00 Ratings
Simplicity9.015 Ratings00 Ratings
Power Savings9.614 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.3 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Dell VMAX
Dell VMAX
Score 9.7 out of 10
NetApp AFF A-Series
NetApp AFF A-Series
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(20 ratings)
8.7
(13 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(3 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(6 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
Dell Unity XT Unified StorageNetApp FAS Storage Arrays
Likelihood to Recommend
Dell Technologies
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.
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NetApp
It is very easy to use with NFS. Creating new volumes and mounting to servers such as ESXi or Linux is a breeze. It does also support CIFS but it is far less intuitive and requires much more effort. Replicated data is also very simple and robust in the form of SnapVaults or SnapMirrors. This data is either immediately or periodically replicated to a peer FAS in the cluster for retention.
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Pros
Dell Technologies
  • 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).
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NetApp
  • The selling point for NetApp FAS is the application and data protection integration capabilities they provide.
  • We have been able to use NetApp FAS in a variety of use cases with a standard set of management tools.
  • NetApp FAS has evolved over the years from just NAS to also include block protocols. At this time they support almost all industry standard protocols.
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Cons
Dell Technologies
  • 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.
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NetApp
  • Deduplication job runs at certain times and creates a large CPU overhead for the system
  • Management of a volumes, disk groups, LUNs, etc. is a burden to manage and is not efficient with storage capacity
  • Upgrades are complicated and not "non-disruptive"
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Usability
Dell Technologies
Very cumbersome compared to other vendors in the same marketplace.
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NetApp
It does have a really nice and easy to use web interface to do pretty much anything you need with it. It was very simple to configure our volumes and luns and connect them to our VMWare environment using the interface. It has options to rename, shrink, grow, and other things with our luns and volumes. It was nice and easy to read graphs to see where you stand on your storage usage at a glance.
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Support Rating
Dell Technologies
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.
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NetApp
NetApp support in Brazil is managed by its partners. We know in other countries, such as the US and NO, they have support directly from Netapp. We have a very good NetApp partner working with us since the beginning, on both the implementation and daily support. Very few cases needed to be escalated to NetApp support, most of the cases are handled and satisfyingly closed by the partner.
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Alternatives Considered
Dell Technologies
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.
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NetApp
NetApp stacked nicely and gave enterprise-level usability for snapshot-based backups. Our previous RPO was several hours. It was selected prior to me arriving at the company, but It was selected for the hardware refreshes due to its compatibility with several other vendors, like CommVault and VMware.
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Return on Investment
Dell Technologies
  • 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
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NetApp
  • The speed of file recovery is the biggest positive impact. Recovering from a ransomware attack in minutes is something you can certainly brag about.
  • Integration with products like Exchange and SQL can certainly speed up normal day to day processes. Not just in backup recovery situations either.
  • Redundant paths make migrations and updates very easy with no downtime.
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