CTERA Edge X Series (discontinued) vs. Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

This is all about the selling you a "Device" and prices vary greatly between resellers. The devices work well, but the pure cloud solutions need a lot of work.

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

• Standard File Backup

• 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

• SQL Backups just don't work reliably. For us, we lost all of our SQL data backed up through the CTERA Application process. Although the logs indicated a success, that was really not the case. This came close to putting us out of business. Luckily I had taken a genuine SQL backup to a folder. Unfortunately it was a month old. We had to pick-up the pieces from there.
• Don't use it for file sync and share. There are better products out there i.e. anchorworks.com
• Support sucks. Good luck with response time and answers that are inconsistent between team members. For example I had to rebuild a VM from scratch. When I re-installed the CTERA client It obviously thought I was adding another device. When I inquired to tech support, one member said "copy the old Data folder" (I still had the old VHD. That did not work). The other directed me to the correct spot to just change the associated folder. The turn-around time was over 24 hours for this simple fix.
• Documentation, plenty of fodder but no real tech there.

• 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

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

Unfortunately CTERA does not stack up well if you want a pure cloud BDR. I have use iDrive and Asigra. iDrive has similar support and SQL backup issues. Asigra can vary widely in support and price, but the software is solid.

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

• NONE, it about put us out of business

• 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