Cisco SmartStack vs. Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Cisco SmartStack

Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Cisco SmartStack	Score 0.0 out of 10	N/A	SmartStack integrated infrastructure, jointly developed by Cisco and Nimble Storage integrates computing, networking, and storage resources. It's designed to scale transparently and independently, so users can quickly respond to changing business requirements.	N/A
Dell Unity XT Unified Storage	Score 10.0 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

Pricing

Cisco SmartStack

Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Cisco SmartStack	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Cisco SmartStack	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Considered Both Products	Cisco SmartStack No answer on this topic	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage UK Utkarsh Khandelwal System Administrator Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? Jagmender Kharb Technical Team Lead Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage IBM FlashSystem Incentivized Helpful? AG Amit Gupta AIX Administrator Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage IBM FlashSystem and NetApp AFF A-Series All Flash Arrays Incentivized Helpful? DB Debopriya Bhattacharya AIX Administrator Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storwize (now part of FlashSystems) Incentivized Helpful? Vinay Damle Associate Director Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage 1. Cost-effective 2. Easy to maintain 3. Reliable and stable 4. User friendly 5. Reduced power consumption 6. Storage for different types of data. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage Dell EMC Unity is for our organization the follow-up array for the discontinued VNX array. Incentivized Helpful? Lukas Mizera Information Technology Infrastructure Specialist - Storage Management Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage From my experience, Dell EMC belongs to the second class of storage arrays due to less popularity and performance compared to "the big heads". Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage Due the corporations history of using Dell solutions, Dell EMC Unity fit in perfectly with the corporations technology strategy. It also was comparable to other solutions in terms of performance and reliability. The support was also exceptional. Incentivized Helpful? RL Rakesh Lohar Associate Engineer 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Muhammad Mulla Systems Administrator, Core Infrastructure & Microsoft Systems Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage Unity is the successor to the EMC VNX but has a much simpler and more user-friendly interface. It is also much more easy to manage and integrate with VMware. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage I came into Dell EMC SC Series Compellent with only limited knowledge of the Dell EMC Unity. Don't get me wrong, the Dell EMC Unity is fine for what it needs to do. The next series or next class of storage is the Compellent. We had to go this direction with storage, as the … Incentivized Helpful? Timothy Sawah IT Project Manager Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage UNITY integrates better with VMware compared to IBM Storwize and HP StorageWorks. In terms of performance, the three systems deliver almost similar performance. In terms of cost, Netapp are cheaper, whereas the IBM and HP solutions are more expensive. Based on the gartner … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage We selected the Dell EMC Unity after looking at several other vendor solutions. We were budget conscious and wanted to select a device which would bring known quantities to the table. We were looking for devices which could support flash drives as the read cache for frequently … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Dell Unity XT Unified Storage We acquired Unity as a replacement for our VNXe3200, due to hardware limitations, low performance, lack of features such as auto-tiering, and also its EOL. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Cisco SmartStack

Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Enterprise Flash Array Storage

Comparison of Enterprise Flash Array Storage features of Product A and Product B
	Cisco SmartStack - Ratings	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage 9.3 Ratings 4% above category average
Flash Array Performance	00 Ratings	9.40 Ratings
Flash Array Integration	00 Ratings	9.40 Ratings
Data Compression	00 Ratings	9.70 Ratings
Non-Intrusive Upgrades	00 Ratings	8.80 Ratings
Simplicity	00 Ratings	9.10 Ratings
Power Savings	00 Ratings	9.60 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Cisco SmartStack	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Small Businesses	No answers on this topic	No answers on this topic
Medium-sized Companies	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10	Pure Storage FlashArray Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Cisco SmartStack	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Likelihood to Recommend	- (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	7.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Cisco SmartStack	Dell Unity XT Unified Storage
Likelihood to Recommend	No answers on this topic	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 Jeniffer Luis Project Delivery Manager Read full review
Pros	No answers on this topic	Dell EMC Unity has improved on the end user management experience over their older product suites. Dell EMC Unity once stood up is reliable and performs to expectations. Dell EMC Unity allows for small entry into the the product suite and can grow based on needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	No answers on this topic	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	No answers on this topic	Very cumbersome compared to other vendors in the same marketplace. Incentivized RL Rakesh Lohar Associate Engineer Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	No answers on this topic	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	No answers on this topic	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 Timothy Sawah IT Project Manager Read full review
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